dream fragment

Probably because I had been thinking of the "Expecto Patronum" TOTM before bed, during one scene in a long sequence of NLDs, there appeared a phoenix resembling the one kept by Dumbledore.

NLD: I was standing outdoors talking to three men (random DCs, no resemblance to anyone from WL). At one point I noticed a very large bird flying overhead, crimson and crested, and recognized it as a phoenix. I thought this was a remarkable thing to see, so I lifted my right hand in the air as a gesture of acknowledgment and welcome.

The phoenix turned began diving toward me. What would happen if it touched my hand? I momentarily worried that it might choose that moment to burst into flames, consuming me. But I kept my hand up to see what would happen, and the phoenix flew right over my head, just low enough that my fingers grazed its soft belly feathers.

I felt honored and delighted by this contact, so when it turned for another pass I kept my hand elevated, and it happened again. When it turned for a third pass, I wondered if it would be okay if I switched hands: would changing the pattern scared it off? I raised my left hand, and it flew down to gently graze that one too.

As it readied itself for a fourth pass, I began to suspect there must be something deliberate about its actions. What was it doing? I had the impression that it was trying to protect us. But what sort of protection could be imparted this way? "Fire resistance," I thought, and in another simultaneous scene, as though the dream had split into two concurrent but disconnected spaces, I was consulting the new D&D Player's Handbook I had been browsing in an earlier dream sequence, looking up the rules on fire resistance. How much FR might we get from touching a phoenix? +1? +2? Total protection?

Meanwhile, in the main scene, the phoenix was turning for a fourth dive. "Touch it," I instructed the others, so they would be protected too. Why was the phoenix trying to protect us in this way? Were we in danger of some immanent conflagration?

NLD fragment, early: There was a band of Thai Buddhist monks in Bangkok called "Sacred Light." Contrary to what you'd expect, their music was surprisingly harsh and experimental. A musician from another band commented about one of the group, "His music has an edge of irrancidity." I woke up and for a few minutes I remained fully convinced that "irrancidity" was as much of a real word as "rancidity" (sort of like how you can legitimately say either "regardless" or "irregardless").

NLD: (I'll gloss over this since it was tedious and contains a lot of RL details. It was a basic anxiety dream: I was performing a task at my workplace and I was ill-prepared, everything was going wrong, and a senior colleague was observing the whole fiasco.)

Proto-lucid: After the anxiety dream I half-woke and was reminded of my speculations lately about the degree to which increased stress in waking life might actually be a condition actually favorable to lucidity. I slipped from these musings into a proto-lucid event—I don't want to call it a "lucid dream" per se because it felt too superficial and unformed. It started when I transitioned from my half-awake thoughts into walking past the house where I grew up. The back door was wide open, including the screen door, and this bothered me. Was the house abandoned? Or were the people who lived there now just careless? It was not a good idea to leave the door open like that because the nearby wetlands meant that the summer air was always thick with mosquitos and biting flies.

I stepped up to the threshold and called out, "Hello? Hello?" There was no response. The interior was decorated differently than I remembered, which I attributed to the fact that other people lived there now. I was reminded of the last episode of "The Leftovers" I watched Sunday night and figured that with the door wide open like that, even a large animal like a deer could wander inside. I decided not to go in—it didn't feel like "my" home anymore and I would be intruding on someone else's space, even if they weren't present. However, the wide open door still annoyed me, so I closed the inner screen door. Then I mostly closed the outer door as well. If the inhabitants came by and found their door unexpectedly closed it might startle them, but they should know better than to leave it open in the first place.

I continued walking around the side of the house and headed down toward the chicken house and barn. I was impatient to cover the distance so I started running, and I was reminded how good running felt when I was living here in my teens. Sometimes I would just run across the grass with sheer exhilaration and excess of energy. It's been a long time since I've felt like that—especially when running! When I got to the space between the two buildings I peeked into the chicken house, but it was empty so I went into the barn instead. I had noticed some people in the pasture so I crept quietly through the barn to the lower area where it connected with the pasture and peeked around the wall. Yes, there were definitely a couple people in the pasture, about a hundred yards away. I was pleased that the dream was finally starting to take some initiative and manifest something other than the basic environment. However, I didn't want those people to see me, since I still felt like an intruder now that they owned the place, so I remained hidden.

I went back inside the lower level of the barn and headed for the stairs that led upstairs. Meanwhile I reflected on how muddy and vague the environment still was, despite the fact that the dream had been otherwise stable so far. My senses were crap. I had experienced this in plenty of WILDs—which in hindsight this might have almost been, though since it had started in a non-standard location (my WILDS typically involve me "getting up" out of bed) I simply might not have recognized it as such. But at that time I still didn't want to give it credit for being a real dream at all, because I felt that it didn't quite measure up. Maybe I'm getting too critical; on reflection it looks more like a real dream than it felt at the time. But that's probably just a trick of print: the dreamstate was not really rising to the occasion, and I felt too much like I was "working the controls," as it were.

Anyway, I was contemplating the muddy, vague environment, which I felt was being shaped almost more through my conscious memory of the place than through the independent activity of the dream. Last night I had been reading a thread on DV about ADA, which included claims that greater awareness in waking life can also sharpen one's dream senses, and I couldn't help but acknowledge that my ordinary level of perceptiveness in waking life is probably much lower than most people's—because in effect I've spent most of my life practicing how to filter things out, not let them in. That said, my dream senses are usually reasonably sharp (with the exception of taste and smell) and my recall can be quite good, but I thought that perhaps the muddiness of the environment this time had been conditioned by that chain of thought.

I headed up the stairs to the upper level of the barn. I wandered around a bit more but don't recall encountering or thinking anything else of note before I woke up.

On waking, I realized that the circumstances were now all in order for a proper WILD attempt, but although I went through the ritual in a way that felt like it should have been successful, in the end I just fell into a period of regular sleep without even an NLD to show for it. This has actually happened several times over the last couple weeks, which is irritating given my satisfying successes earlier this month.

Complex narratives but poor recall all night. Just one fragment has enough clarity and interest to preserve in writing:

NLD: There was a big bed of ice cubes spread out over the floor, about fifteen by twenty feet wide and up to a foot thick. It was there to chill something that may have been on a small round platform in the center of it, but I don't remember what. I was more interested in the ice.

The ice cubes were all different sizes. I lay down on them on my back at one point and found this extremely comfortable: they weren't as cold as one would expect ice to be, but refreshingly cool. In fact, I wasn't sure they were proper ice, because most of them weren't melting. Only the smallest ones, spheres of ice about two inches in diameter still in their plastic molds (just like the ones I use for gin and tonics, I recalled) showed a slickness of water inside the plastic. I decided I'd better take care not use any of these ice cubes in drinks, however, in case the water was contaminated with chemicals.

The largest ice cubes also intrigued me. They were rectangular blocks around nine inches high and deep by about fifteen inches long. There was a slight asymmetry to their form, a matte textured surface of striations, and they weren't melting at all. I noticed that the blocks of this size appeared very similar to one another and knelt down to investigate more closely. After comparing two in detail, I determined that yes, they were clearly products of the same mold, however the molding process had resulted in very slight irregularities: one sculpted corner was complete in the first block but slightly truncated in the next as though the mold had not been filled completely the second time.

I find it amazing that I can muster such a close comparative appraisal of aspects of the dream environment, demonstrating that my critical thinking was not completely impaired, and yet completely fail to muster even a sliver of the kind of critical apprehension necessary to recognize that I am dreaming.

NLD: I was a stage magician, a white male in late middle age. I have the impression that my character looked and talked a bit like the actor Bill Nighy. I had been doing a really long show -- it started at 6, now it was 9pm, I had just taken a break and had to perform one more brief act before I could wrap up and call it a night. I realized I should streamline the show, this was exhausting, and the audience was probably almost as weary as I was.

I was trying to find my way back to the place where the theatre was located in a huge new building that had been recently constructed for my show, but I took a wrong turn and found myself on the roof. Up there I ran into a colleague who resembled (or was supposed to be?) Gary Gygax, and we commiserated, "We're getting too old for this shit." I retraced my steps, passing a teenager who I asked about something, but his answer was unhelpful.

As I made my way back to the theatre I was carrying a large bag of stiffened canvas printed with a cheerful decorative pattern. I had picked this bag up from the room where I had gone on break. It held a nested series of ever-smaller bags made from the same material. I was planning to give these away as prizes at the end of the show, like we always did, based on calling out random ticket numbers. I wondered if I should give away the largest outer bag as well, or save it to carry the smaller bags again next time. I examined it closely and realized that it had some discoloration around the handle and decided that it wouldn't make a very nice prize because it wasn't in new condition.

NLD, first sleep: Several of us are downstairs in a house at night. The front door is wide open. Through an adjacent window, I see a man sitting on a bench next to the road outside, waiting for the bus. Perhaps he tires of waiting, because after a while he gets up and walks right in the front door. I recognize him as "The Vagrant," a character played by Johnny Depp. He wears white face make-up and an old fashioned suit and hat, resembling a mime from the Charlie Chaplin era. I feel hospitable toward him and offer to let him sleep in the wife's room, as she is not home. (I have no sense of who "the wife" might be; there's something impersonal about all the DCs; they are more like roles than individuals.) Someone standing nearby ("the husband"?) gives me a dirty look for leaving the door open and then telling the vagrant he can stay. I don't openly acknowledge the glance, but gives me a sense of foreboding: I don't know anything about this guy, and I've just offered to let him sleep in one of the upstairs rooms. If he turns out to have ill intent, we'll be leaving ourselves vulnerable when we go to sleep.

Scene change. There are about three of us upstairs now on a sort of balcony, in addition to the vagrant, who is swinging on a rope. He has not said a word since entering the house, and I start to wonder if we should be worried about his intentions. I consult the DM, who is not physically present in the scene: "If I do 'sense alignment', is it blatant?" It feels as though I ask the question aloud, but in a way that does not manifest audibly in the dream scene -- I'm asking OOCly (out of character). The DM confirms that, yes, the effect would be blatant, meaning that I can't cast the spell on the vagrant without him noticing, either because I have to make distinctive invocations and gestures, or because he would be able to subjectively feel the mental intrusion. I don't want to cast the spell if the vagrant will be aware of it, because at this point I already strongly suspect that his alignment is not on the "good" spectrum, and I don't want to alert him to my suspicions. After the vagrant leaves off swinging, one of the other players on the balcony asks the DM if she can use the same effect on the rope that he has just let go of. She's trying to be clever: a rope, obviously, won't notice anything amiss or feel itself being scryed on. However, she seems to be missing the obvious, so before the DM has a chance to respond, I scoff jokingly, "You can't 'sense alignment' on a rope!"

Note: I'm interested in the way dreams can take on aspects of other forms of representation. Mine are often heavily influenced by structural elements from films, video games, and even tabletop gaming, the first and last of which were strongly present here.

NLD, second sleep: The fabric of the dream was very thin and immediately frayed upon waking because I did not keep still enough. There was an elaborate plot that I wasn't able to piece back together. However, I was with a group of people that were playing costumed characters, acting out scenes that were somewhere between a play and a LARP.

Afterwards, an actor who is a dwarf (of the genetic, not the fantasy variety), comments to me about his disinterest in playing out live-action versions of stories he has already filmed or done on stage. "Kid, we want to see it, or we want to hear about it. We don't want to live it. We've already done that."

Note: This dream appears to have been incubated by the thoughts I wrote down after the last dream about the various representational formats that have been an influence on my dreaming. Dream would like to remind me that I left out plays and LARPs. Thanks, Dream, I guess my dreaming is also influenced by plays and LARPs (even if I haven't engaged in either since the '90s). Anything else?

We stopped at a Greek take-out restaurant. I saw bags of take-out orders being loaded onto a plane to be shipped all the way to Greece. "Wow, this place is hardcore," I thought.

We had parked right under the nose of the plane, where there was a niche just big enough for the car (a 2006 silver Volkswagen bug) to fit. I was a worried because it looked like the plane was about to take off, but figured it would be okay, since the plane would have to back up first, which would release the car from underneath it, and then the plane would turn ninety degrees to access the runway. The car should be fine. Still, I thought I should check. I called up to a lady in the cockpit, "Hey, is it alright if we park--"

Before I could even finish the sentence, a metal plate slammed down over the nose of the plane, closing up the niche where our car was parked. Meanwhile the plane began to pull backward, flattening the top of the car. There was a white flash and the sound of an explosion, and I knew the car was ruined.

I was annoyed because I had been hoping to inherit this car when my husband was done with it. Still, what was done was done, and there was no point getting bent out of shape now. So I tried to stay calm and figure out if there was anything practical to be done.

Note: 2006, the year of the car, is clearly WLR (waking life residue), as last night I was comparing various editions of a book that included this year. The plane is also WLR as I've been flying a lot recently. Not sure where the Greek restaurant came from.

After some non-lucid sequences in my hotel room, I found myself in the kitchen of my house. I knew I was out of town on a trip, so I felt like I was just checking in. However things were a mess, even I knew the catsitter had been coming. There were lots of bowls of food out but they looked old and uncleaned, and the water was dirty. I went over to the sink to start washing them and I noticed that the sink was already full of dirty dishes. However, I distinctly remembered that I had done all the dishes before leaving on my trip. "Does this mean I'm lucid?" I thought to myself, and decided, "Of course, certainly," and felt that I had been aware that I had been dreaming all along even though I evidently had not been until I noticed the discontinuity. (In one of the earlier sequences I had been confusing about whether I was awake or dreaming to the point where I felt convinced that dream events were impinging in impossible ways on waking life.) I wondered if there were other discontinuities and looked around. I noticed that the catsitter had not taken the check I left for her, and that seemed odd. Wouldn't she have taken it on the first visit? However, I realized that this wasn't necessarily a discontinuity, because there might have been plausible reasons for her to have left it until later.

I started washing a dirty bowl at the sink, one that the cats could use, but then I reflected, "If I'm lucid, maybe I should go do something else. I know! I'm in my kitchen, it would be a great opportunity to go outside and leave a trail of breadcrumbs to try to do the Hansel and Gretel task. But first I'll just wash this bowl and leave some fresh food and water for the kitties." So I stayed at the sink and continued washing the bowl, and also washed and refilled a water bowl.

Even though the dream felt very stable to start, I was a bit paranoid that it wouldn't last long enough to let me get to my more interesting task, and I felt like this anxiety about waking was pushing me closer to actually doing so, and tried to put it out of mind. However, I soon felt my senses disengage and half-woke. But I didn't lose the mental image, and after a moment felt my senses re-engage and knew I was back in the dream. So I rushed to get a can of catfood and put it in the bowl I had now cleaned. A dream version of one cat came out and didn't seem interested in the food I had selected, though I figured, maybe this is a good thing, because if the catsitter feeds her food she likes better, the cat (who is very skittish) might feel more friendly to her. Just as I had finished this and was ready to start on my new task, I woke up again, and though I held very still, the dream state was too disrupted to re-enter.

I was a bit annoyed with myself for wasting a lucid opportunity, but I understood my rationale. Even though I knew I was dreaming, I was not comfortable with the idea of leaving my dream-cats ill-tended, so that took priority over any other task. However, the error I made was in tending to them using the tedious methods of waking life: actually standing at the sink and washing bowls, actually going to another room to get the food and walking back with it, opening the can and using a spoon to empty the food into the bowl. I guess I did it this way out of habit, as it certainly felt like I was going through very familiar motions. I should have just manifested some clean food and water and then gotten to my task much more quickly.

I was in a big enclosed public space like a mall and needed to use the restroom. I found the ladies' room, which was a relatively large one with around nine stalls in a single row. I found a stall that was clean and was about to go inside when another woman barged right ahead of me. The next stall I checked had an unflushed toilet, as well as the one after that, and the third one was clean but had no toilet seat. I decided to use it anyway. I stepped into the stall and then remembered, "Wait... aren't dirty public restrooms one of my dream signs? This one isn't particularly dirty but still, I'd better RC." I counted my fingers and saw nothing unusual, then focused on the sensation of gravity and it also felt completely normal.

I remembered the time that I had failed an RC under similar circumstances and decided I'd better make extra sure. So I focused on levitating, really putting a lot of effort into it, but my feet remained firmly stuck to the ground and even the sensation of gravity or my bodily awareness did not alter or feel any more dream-like. So that was how I knew I was awake... until some time later, when I actually woke up, and wondered how the RC could have failed so completely. The gravity RC is usually very reliable, and even on the rare occasions that I don't levitate promptly, I'll notice that gravity or my body don't "feel" right. On this occasion the illusion was perfect!

Woke after five hours vaguely remembering a dream about being on a space ship. Some kids were catching a ride by hanging on to our landing gear as we went between stations, and I wondered how they didn't freeze and suffocate in the airless void.

I wasn't planning on doing any real practice since I didn't sleep much last night after my excellent LD got me out of bed early and writing furiously, but since I'd woken up from REM I thought I'd run through some SSILD cycles just for fun... and this provoked a sleeplessness that eventually got me out of bed an hour and a half later without having fallen back asleep at all. So no dreams, but I did manage to record fragments of the hypnagogic phrases that manifested at certain points:

"...the beautiful eye, and the faithful smiling hand..."

"...the stress of a healthy city farm too..."

"...semantic, and by the way kill the emperors..."

Mostly these were just words running through my head without any corresponding imagery, but at one point I had a hypnogogic image like I was looking at a forum post (unsurprising given that I waded through almost the whole SSILD thread yesterday, a tedious enterprise at 36 pages). So this one I "read" visually rather than thought directly. My recall of first few words flickered out almost immediately, but the sentence concluded "...and the king's building in apotheosis."