lucid

Ritual: WTB 3am, woke several times before and after dawn but didn't WBTB, woke around 9:30am and put vibrating alarm on wrist, set for 24 minutes. Woke up too soon, before it went off, reset it. Next cycle effective.

EILD: I feel the pulse of the alarm on my left wrist, waking me, but remember to lay very still and see if I can maintain dream state. I experimentally move my hands and arms and from the sinuous and unimpeded sense of motion I'm convinced this is working, that I'm moving the dream body and not the physical one. I know I have to be careful not to overdo it and actually engage real motor functions, so I spend some time almost "dancing" in place with my arms, writhing them bonelessly like a snake dance, until I have enough sense of engagement with the dream body that I risk rolling out of bed. I can't walk yet: I can barely crawl over the rug. I know I need to engage the environment, so I stare at the carpet, noticing the texture of the pile. I'm pleased when I spot a piece of random detritus under my dresser, because something unexpected means the dreamstate is gaining momentum. To gain traction I focus on physical sensations, running my hands over the carpet and even bending lower to rub my cheek against it. Even though I've done this many times before I'm still impressed with the vividness of the sensation, it feels so scratchy and real.

When I feel sufficiently engaged with my dream body, I manage to stand upright and walk. I easily recall my plan to work on memory—carefully though! I don't want to actually wake myself up. Trying to remember where I went to sleep seems unnecessary, as I still haven't left the bedroom. What about the date? I'm pretty sure it's February... I don't want to think harder to get the precise date lest that efffort wake me. (It's worth nothing that I usually have to think just as hard to remember the calendar date in WL. Usually I just look at my phone because it's easier.)

I start walking through the hall toward the kitchen. What other memory should I try to access? I know, what have I been reading lately? I'm pretty sure I came up with the correct general impression, but even as I write this, details of my waking life knowledge of this topic are corrupting and crowding out the dream recollections to the point where it is hard to be sure how specific my answer was. At any rate, in the dream I felt satisfied with my level of memory access and moved on.

As I entered the kitchen I noticed something peculiar: even though I was in a very accurate mental model of my house and had a strong access to waking recollection, and had even managed to access WL memory without disrupting the dream state, it had not in the least improved it either. I had a good sense of tactility (I find that the easiest sense to maintain), but as so often in early WILDs (which this effectively was though induced by EILD technique), my vision was still extremely poor. The haziness was mitigated by the fact that I was in a dream version of my house, as I almost am at the start of dreams of this type, so I "knew" what was around me and that knowledge could help make up for the lack of visual clarity. Perhaps that is partly why my mind instinctively frames such dreams in this way, in addition to the straightforward logical continuity of entering the dream from a mental model of the same place I went to sleep. It moreover suggests that from the start of WILDs I always instinctively remember where my WL body is sleeping, even if I am not paying deliberate attention to the fact.

I wondered if concentrating would clean up my vision but there was no improvement— it's too bad I didn't think of Fryingman's awesome technique, which I only read about last night, of "taking off the blurry glasses." I figured I should try to clean it up in the usual way, interacting with the dreamstate until it naturally clarified and brightened. Meanwhile, I thought about the other tasks I had been planning. Most important was the elusive forest. After many tries fruitlessly trying to reach it on foot, I decided that I need to stop chasing it, since I seem to be encountering a mental block, and instead will it to manifest around me. I also remembered another task that I've been wanting to try for ages but never managed to think of when dreaming (so maybe this memory trick is working after all?) My idea was to see if I could "play" my WoW character, a Forsaken, and explore the Undercity. I murmur her name aloud, but decide to save that for another time—right now my main goal is to work on the forest.

I stand squarely in my kitchen and start to visualize myself surrounded by trees. There is a tall houseplant to my right with feathery foliage: it must be the little potted tree I used for Christmas, a Norfolk pine. I reach out and grasp its soft needles with my right hand, thinking this will help focus my thoughts on the forest I am attempting to conjure. Intriguingly, I fail to notice the spatial discrepancy: although the real tree is only a few feet from where I dreamed it, in WL it is now outside on the patio rather than inside the house.

Unfortunately, this is as close as I get to manifesting anything like a forest before my husband comes into the room. I figure he'll just ignore me because I am dreaming—and oddly I make the assumption, as I seem so often to do in the dreamstate, that I am encountering the real-life version of him even though I know I am dreaming. Maybe it is this tendency that makes some people interpret dreams so closely modeled on RL spaces as "OBEs". But I am thrown into confusion when my husband looks right at me and starts talking. What does it mean? How can he possibly see me? Could I have been wrong in my conviction that so-called "OBEs" are a naive misinterpretation of certain kinds of LDs; might I really be "projecting" an image of myself into the waking world? This still doesn't seem plausible, but the only alternative I can think of is that I am actually awake. (Note the dream logic: despite the generally high level of memory access and mental function in this dream, I completely fail to consider the most likely— and as it turns out correct—alternative, that the encounter with my husband is nothing more than a projection of my dreaming imagination.)

So am I awake or dreaming? I'm not sure anymore. It feels like a dream, and I'm still not seeing my environment very clearly, but maybe I'm still groggy and bleary from having just gotten up. How could I be confused about this, though? Although there are plenty of times that I'm fully convinced I'm awake and turn out to have been dreaming, not once have I ever been fully convinced I was dreaming and turned to be awake. It doesn't occur to me to try any of the typical RCs, but I focus my attention inward, on my sense of bodily awareness, to try to figure this out. I've often noticed that my dream body is characterized by a peculiar kind of inward vibration radiating from the area of my solar plexus—this impression used to be very strong and distinct, especially when flying, but it has become much less noticeable as I've grown more experienced. I think I can sense it now but it is very faint.

My husband is still talking, and although I am too perplexed to follow what he is saying, he seems to be complaining about some bad habit of mine. "...twenty-one times a day," he concludes. Apparently that's how often I do the thing that has been annoying him. Does it have something to do with my dream practice?

The encounter has now totally disrupted my concentration on the forest task, so I turn around and approach the patio door, thinking I'll just go outside. The weather looks lovely, cloudy and wet. "Hey, it's raining," I comment aloud, and anticipate how nice it will be to feel the cool water on my skin. I start to take off my sweater so I'll have something dry to put on when I come back in (it doesn't occur to me how odd it is that I'm wearing a sweater if I supposedly just got out of bed) and pull open the door.

"Don't, we have to leave," warns my husband. I recall (correctly) that he wanted us to go out on an errand today, but even if I am somehow actually awake, it must still be mid-morning. I assumed we were going in the afternoon, why would he want to leave so early? With these thoughts the dream is finally disrupted and I wake up.

Note: On the way to my laptop to write things down, I remember the silent alarm still on my wrist and look at the time. It reads 20:42, and it was set for intervals of 24 minutes, which means the whole dream played out in just under three and a half minutes. Of course, then it took an hour and a half to fully record, which is maybe why it's a good thing I don't LD every night, lol.

Ritual: wtb 1am, woke 5:45am, wbtb about an hour, take supplements (piracetam, bacopa, choline, alpha-gpc, l-theanine), lay on back, doze off, turn to side, woke 8am to record dream.

DEILD: I half-wake from an unremarkable NLD and realize I can DEILD. As I transition I can distinctly hear a woman's voice speaking, though she wasn't saying anything memorable. After a while I hear a new voice a man responding, and figure this is a good sign, suggesting that the hynagogic state is deepening toward dream. As soon as I feel like I am fully transitioned, I get out of bed. I remember the task I had intended: the storm TOTM. I go outside, intending to summon it, but the dream does not yet feel stabilized and my surroundings become vague. I retransition and realize that there's no reason I should feel constrained by concepts like "inside" and "outside," and decide to summon the storm from right in my bedroom. I look up at the ceiling and it becomes transparent, so that I can see the sky overhead. It is half-lit, with faint stars and gauzy clouds: I will the clouds to thicken and darken.

After another spell of vagueness, maybe a retransition, I go back outside to see if there is evidence of a storm yet. It is working! There is a patch of very heavy dark clouds overhead. It it not yet a full-blown storm so I work on it a little more. I raise my hands and shout, "Wind!" I am modeling this on the scene from the film Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) where he conjures the clouds so it will get dark faster. I decide to add a little more panache: "WIND AND FIRE!" I yell, still gesticulating at the sky. The clouds are roiling and I do see patches of fire, so when it is sufficiently apocalyptic, I fly directly up into the cloudbank.

The effect is disappointing: I have no real sensory impressions apart from sight, and the visibility is very poor. It is hard to distinguish the greyness inside the clouds from the greyness of unformed dream, except that I notice that the fire has coalesced into vaguely anthropomorphic forms that resemble elementals or demons. Although they are distant and none moves to threaten me, I feel vaguely anxious and start singing to reassure myself. The dream destabilizes and I retransition.

I go outside again, and find myself on a slightly elevated walkway; just below is a middle-aged white guy who seems to be gardening. He looks up at me and says with an air of disappointment: "You can do better than this." I feel as though he is chastising me for summoning the storm, and feel a pang of guilt, although there is no rational basis for this. After entering a building, I look down and notice that I am carrying a phone. It is not a contemporary model but resembles those old Nokias with the small monochrome screens that can render text but not graphics. Distinctly legible on the screen is the word: "SmarKu," a mix of lower-case and capital letters as though it were abbreviated from something. The word intrigues me, so I ask:

"SmarKu, what are you?"

"A phone," it answers simply.

Well, duh. I try rephrasing my question, "I mean, what do you represent?"

"..."

Since the phone seems confused or reluctant to answer, I finally resort to a term I dislike, speaking forcefully for emphasis: "What do you symbolize?"

"A pimp and a whore," retorts the phone with an edge of sarcasm.

I can't help but laugh at the inexplicable rudeness of the reply. What is this, a dream version of Tourette's syndrome?

I retransition and go back outside, running across two gentlemen having a heated discussion. I find their conversation boring and don't make any particular effort to remember it, but this reminds me of the thread (I think it was last month's TOTM) where we were discussing the fact that it feels different to "think" something in a dream versus saying it "aloud," even though it is hard to conceptualize the difference. To test this principle, I comment inwardly on how dull their conversation is, and pay attention to how this manifests. I do not "hear" the words with my dream ears, nor do I seem to "speak" them in my dream voice, so it feels no different from thinking something in waking life. I walk over to them and think it directly in their presence, to see if they will respond: "How dully, sir!" (In retrospect it seems like an odd turn of phrase, but it felt natural at the time.) They do not react to me, so it still feels like a private thought. I decide to try a little experiment: I silently will one of the DCs to say these words aloud for me. Without a moment's hesitation, he pipes up to his companion: "How dully, sir!"

This was so successful that I'm encouraged to try again with the second guy. Mischievously, I select the same words that the SmarKu used earlier. Sure enough, the guy says out of nowhere, "A pimp and a whore." At this point I go right up to him and ask, "What do you mean by that?" I expect him to be confused or uncertain about why he said it, but instead he starts explaining himself. This is really unexpected: he is taking responsibility for the phrase as though saying it were his own idea! All I could think was... so DCs rely on dream logic? I... guess that makes sense.

There is a destabilization, and before my eyes I watch the environment fluctuate from brilliant light and clarity to hazy vagueness. I suspect this is due to my own lack of mental focus, slipping too close to wakefulness again, and I tell myself that I don't have to wake up if I don't want to. Back in my bedroom, I maintain dreamstate through a rough patch by singing again and focusing on sensual impressions. As I sing, it feels like my voice is joined by invisible others, singing with me in harmony. This reminds me of my lucid dare—from last year—which I've never quite completed to my satisfaction.

I go back outside, willing it to be stable. I frame my arms around empty air as though around an unseen person and dance, hoping the invisible owner of one of the voices will manifest. No such luck. I notice a DC standing nearby, a middle-aged black man, and ask him, "Have you seen an elf around here?"

"Yes," he replies. Okay, I realize I might have willed him to say that using my new trick, but if it conditions my expectations into manifesting the damn elf, it will have been worth it.

"Who?" I inquire further, a specific name in mind.

"Thranduil," he says promptly, just as I anticipated.

"Where is he?" I don't have an answer to this one, so I'm hoping he'll say something helpful.

He points behind me. "Right over there."

I turn and look, hoping my expectations are primed enough that he will be visible. Afraid not. As I squint into the distance, the man explains helpfully, "You can just barely see him, in the edge of the forest."

I still don't see him but I'll take his word for it. The man goes on, "If you hurry, you might be able to catch him. The best way is to go left up those stairs."

I follow his instructions, wondering I should summon a horse to cover the ground faster, but I don't want to add unnecessary complexity and figure that on horseback is not the best way to climb stairs anyway. The stairs are very rustic and appealing, constructed of irregularly cut slabs of old grey stone, with small plants growing out of the cracks, and a low stone wall on either side. They turn to the right and continue to ascend. I'm climbing as fast as I can and observe that either the steps are getting smaller or I'm getting bigger, because now I'm covering at least a dozen with each stride, but I'm still only halfway to the forest's edge when I wake up and sense that the dream state is unrecoverable.

Ritual: Lately I haven't been dreaming much because I've been staying up too late (after 3am usually) playing computer games late at night. I've noticed that the later I go to bed, the less awareness I have in my dreams. Tonight for RL reasons I went to bed two hours earlier than usual, at 1am, and wondered if it might cause me to LD naturally. Sure enough, without any special intention or practices, I woke at 6am with the following...

DILD: I was moving through a grocery store, picking up some items and observing what else I might want to gather, until I reached a row of cash registers and knew I was in the last room. I had already picked up a bag of assorted stuffed animals from a whole bin of them. I recall making the same kind of obsessive comparisons I do in WL to decide which bag to pick. There were slight variations in all the stuffed animals so I was looking for the set I found the most appealing. I decided relatively quickly, the decisive factor being a stuffed bat I liked, and was carrying the bag with me.

I turned around and walked back through the store to pick up some remaining things I hadn't fully decided on the first time through. I was considering getting some food, and glanced at what was on offer in the seafood section. I think I ended up going back out the front door at this point and found myself at a bus stop. The bus came and I didn't think I wanted to leave yet because I wasn't finished in the store. I was planning take the next bus if it were going to come in an hour, but I know sometimes the schedule is slower on Sundays. I asked the ticket seller when the next bus would be, and she said, "1:40." This startled me because it was already around 3:30pm in the afternoon. The next bus couldn't come earlier than this one... did she mean the next one wouldn't be here until the middle of the night? I asked about this and she nodded. I decided I'd better scrap my plans and leave on this bus, because I didn't have enough I wanted to do here to occupy a whole evening. I yelled at the driver not to leave yet and quickly slipped the ticket-seller a twenty dollar bill, which I figured should be enough, though I didn't know the exact price. I grabbed the change without counting it and jumped on the bus. But then I remembered I would also need a ticket for the guy I was with... there had actually been no guy with me earlier in the store scene but now the scene shifted.

I was sitting next to a really hot guy and trying out a computer game he was showing me. This is how my mind accounted for the scene shift: I had been playing a game. Now I was distracted by our conversation. The guy was trying to figure out if he should go to—I think he was calling it "Burning Man," but I knew he meant a big festive parade through the city. After talking to him a few minutes I realized that I hadn't been paying attention to the game. I looked back at the screen and didn't recognize where my character was. Fortunately it was easy to restart from a save. But then my conversation with the guy took an even more distracting turn when I noticed how hot he was, felt an attraction that was apparently mutual, and started kissing him. After a few minutes of that I remembered the game I was playing and worried my character would have gotten killed, but I looked back at the screen and everything was fine... my character was actually going around doing things on his own.

"This game plays itself!" I commented in surprise. But I didn't want to miss any part of the story, so I restarted again, only this time I was disappointed to see that the game had apparently been creating its own saves too, and now even the save point was well past the spot where I had gotten distracted. I wondered if I should just stop playing for now and start over from the beginning later.

The scene shift at this point is vague, but the next thing I knew I was bodily in the game, back at the grocery store—though it looked different than the first one—this time with two companions, a guy and a girl. We were engaged in combat with the store employees, and everyone was throwing bottles. I didn't like this, so I called a halt to the bottle-throwing and my friends and I went outside. I was trying to explain to them what my objections were. "Too much broken glass," I complained. Even out here, the ground was littered with it, and on looking at it I felt a tiny sharp pang in the sole of my left foot. It seemed like I might really be feeling this with my physical body, so I continued my explanation: "The problem is, when there's too much broken glass, then you can feel it in the real world. Some kind of psycho-physical complex." The pang in my foot, which I could still feel, seemed like a great example: here I was in virtual reality, but stepping on broken glass made my real foot twinge. (Interestingly, I think a sensation in my physical foot was actually bleeding into, because I thought I could still feel it faintly when I woke up.)

Up to this point I was not lucid, rather I was convinced that I was bodily immersed in a computer game (I think my brain often explains dreaming this way to itself), but as the pang in my foot made me contemplate the connection between my VR body and my physical body, I realized that I was actually dreaming. I was about to walk off with my friends, but it occurred to me, "If I'm lucid, I should do something useful." I remembered the wine TOTM. I'd just been in a store where we were smashing bottles of wine, what a waste! And we left on such bad terms, they might not like me going back in there... not to mention all that broken glass... but I guess I'd better hazard it. I turned around and half-opened the door, but then I realized there might be an easier way.

I turned back to my friends. "Does anyone have any wine?" The girl immediately pulled a bottle from her backpack and gave it to me. Then I realized there might be another hitch. "Do you have an opener?" I asked her dubiously. She actually did! She pulled out a corkscrew and was waving it in the air at me, but I had already realized that I might be making things more complicated than necessary. I glanced at the bottle of wine and saw that although it was still sealed, the top covered in light blue foil, under the foil the cork seemed to be protruding three-quarters of the way out of the bottle. I tried to pull it out manually and was able to do so easily. There was still a small piece of cork in the neck of the bottle, but this shouldn't be a problem. My other friend was holding a butter knife, so I grabbed it from his hand without ceremony and used the handle (as the blade was smeared with butter) to push the cork inside. Lest it bob up and block the flow of the wine, I kept the knife handle in the neck to hold the cork to one side as I lifted the bottle toward my mouth to drink.

"You guys don't mind if I drink the whole bottle, do you? I'm supposed to for my task." Without waiting for a reply, I tilted my head back and chugged. I was finished in seconds. Fortunately, even though the bottle had been full, it didn't feel like I drank any more than a glassful. My immediate reaction was surprise—that it tasted so convincingly like real wine. "It's actually a decent chardonnay," I commented to the girl who had given me the bottle. I focused my attention on the taste that lingered in my mouth: very buttery, rich, even ambrosial, with a hint of something sour around the edges but not strong enough to be off-putting. As I thought about what words I should use to describe it, I felt myself waking up.

WTB 3am, woke just before 7:30am. Although I had set no alarm, it must have been intention that woke me, since I needed to take my car to the mechanic this morning, and 7:30 is when they open. So I drove in, did some grocery shopping across the street, and then walked back home since it's not too far. Returned to bed around 9am and focused intention to get lucid since I'd had such a good WBTB.

I was at a party in some guy's house. (The "party" theme must be WLR because last night I did the party scene in ME3, though none of the details were similar.) I was younger, maybe even a teenager—I think so, since the guy hosting the party was living with his parents—and wasn't really "me" in terms of identity. I was lounging on the floor with some other kids. A guy next to me joked with someone else about me taking my clothes off, and I reprimanded him sharply.

Vague scene change; it was the next day, and everyone else was gone, but I was still in the house—only now I didn't have my clothes. Obviously I needed to get them before I could leave, but this was complicated by the fact that the host's mother had come home, together with her young baby. I was sneaking around, hoping not to get caught, because I was afraid of how she would react if she found a nude girl in the house. I didn't recall doing anything inappropriate but she would naturally assume the worst.

I managed to sneak into the bathroom and thought that from there I could maybe call her from the door and make up some story about how I had taken a shower and now needed my clothes—though I worried that it might be hard to explain how my clothes had ended up in another room, and it didn't help that I wasn't exactly sure where they were. But my anxieties about this were resolved when I looked down and noticed that I was fully dressed after all. (Thanks, dream!)

Now my only challenge was sneaking out of the house. But the dream was even more obliging in that regard. The mother caught sight of me as soon as I entered the next room, and I was afraid that she would respond with horror and alarm at discovering a stranger in the house. Instead, she just called me over in a friendly way as though we were already well-acquainted and she expected me to be there. We went into her large walk-in closet, where she wanted my opinion on some clothes as she changed. She put on a lower garment that was made of two separately patterned pieces of cloth, one for each leg, that fit very loosely like Thai fisherman pants. Attached to the upper part was a horizontal band of cloth, at least six inches wide and several feet long, in a third contrasting color and pattern, that she could wrap around her waist to secure the garment. The cloth and patterns were lovely and I complemented it; she said that she had made it herself. Next, while she was putting on a top, I noticed how beautifully flat her stomach was in profile and complimented her on that as well. She laughed and said modestly that it had just looked that way because she had been holding her arms over her head.

After that she and her husband went out to an indoor mall and I tagged along. As I glanced around at the various shops, I reminded myself that since we were dreaming I should make sure to attempt one of the tasks, since it had apparently slipped my mind until that point. This made me wonder when I had first realized I was dreaming. I thought back and couldn't figure it out. In retrospect, I don't think I really was cognizant of the dream until that point, but at the time it felt much more ambiguous, like it had been a latent awareness all along. (I get this a lot—I think there is often a latent awareness of dreaming on some level, in which case lucidity requires becoming aware of the awareness!) That might explain why earlier the dream had soothed my anxieties rather than exploiting them, even though I hadn't been aware of directly controlling it.

I figured that since it was the New Year's holiday in the dream, it would be a great time to try the fireworks TOTM again, since there were bound to be fireworks tonight anyway. Again, it's hard to say if I had really "known" all along that it was the holiday, or if I had only just "realized" this when it was convenient to my goals. I was lucid enough to know that in WL it was much later in the month, but remembered it was still January at least... so close enough.

I walked back to the front doors of the mall, which were transparent glass, and looked out over the landscape. I didn't see any fireworks yet—it was dark out but it seemed like it was too early in the evening—and I hoped my intention could make some appear. I scanned the horizon but nothing manifested. I decided maybe it would be easier to spark them directly from my hand, so I turned around and started walking through the mall again, willing some kind of visual display to manifest from my palm. This should be easy, since in the past I've practiced summoning all the basic elements, and fireworks just seemed like a variation of this. But again, nothing happened.

I tried to figure out what the problem was, and wondered if maybe I was too distracted with the music. Here's another case where I can't say for sure when I started singing. Often I deliberately use music in dreams as a way to channel focus into particular tasks, a method that has worked very well in the past, but right now I felt like I was singing for sheer pleasure, and the music was of unearthly beauty. Now that I noticed it, I put aside my other goals for the moment to pay attention to what I was singing. I was using my voice, but there were no real words, just abstract vocalizations emerging spontaneously in a lovely, lilting melody. The most distinctive thing about it was that I was singing in harmony with myself, as though I had several different interweaving voices, at least three, maybe more. I've sung like this before in dreams and once again had to wonder: what does it mean? When the music manifests like this, so complex and ethereal, it feels like it has some primordial significance.

Most of my attention was now focused on the song, and nothing else seemed so important. I wanted to be in the open air, so I returned to the front doors of the mall and walked through them. I sang for a while longer, until the world around me faded in color and substance and I knew I was waking up. My first impulse was to grab my phone and try to record some of the melody as best I could before I lost it entirely. However, my phone seemed to be stuck on camera mode, and although I was insistently pressing the button and even trying to close the window manually by clicking in the upper right corner (a PC reflex, obviously this doesn't work on phones!), I couldn't get back to the main screen. Problems with tech like this are a dreamsign so I even wondered if this was an FA. However, my main concern right was to preserve any shred of the music intact, so I didn't want to distract myself with an RC, but tried to keep as much attention as possible on preserving the song.

Even though I now only had a single voice, I was surprised how easily and spontaneously the music was still flowing, and figured it was because I had just woken up and retained lingering traces of the dreamstate. More than traces, I realized, when I woke up again and knew that it been an FA after all. I once again reached for my phone and was gratified that I could now access the main screen. But I was still having difficulties: I looked through all my apps for the voice recorder and couldn't find it! I went back and forth from screen to screen, cycling through them all three or four times, and it was nowhere! I was forced to question if this was yet another FA, even though I was now sure that I recognized everything around me from waking life, and the dream memories and music were fading rapidly. In the past I've sometimes had trouble recognizing the voice app icon because it has such a bland appearance, but I had made a point of remembering that it resembled a microphone.

After taking more time and deliberately examining every icon on every screen, completely baffled by my inability to find it, the mystery was finally solved. I found it at the very end of all my apps, where I had placed it deliberately with the notion of making it easy to find, only I had misremembered its appearance: the last OS upgrade had completely changed the graphic to some wavy lines. It was too late to salvage the music. I tried to record the one line of melody that I could still vaguely recall, but it sounded completely wrong. I couldn't get my real voice to match the way the song sounded in my head, either in terms of the general register or even the specific notes.

I had taken a two-hour nap earlier in the day, so when I went to bed at 1:45am I did not feel particularly sleepy. It seemed like a good opportunity to get lucid, so I fixed intention on fireworks task and did a few rounds of SSILD before falling asleep.

I had an NLD that was strongly WoW-influenced (day residue) in which I had gotten stuck in the middle of a quest chain and was searching the environment for objects that had a yellow exclamation point over them. This went on for a long time but at some point I finally recognized that I was dreaming. Although this pushed me near waking and disrupted the dream, I had enough awareness to avoid moving and held on to dreamstate as well as I could. I searched for something to better anchor me there, and noticed that I could distinctly hear voices conversing, although I could not see the figures—in fact I couldn't see anything at all.

I don't recall the specific words now although I could hear them clearly at the time. I recall how spontaneous and random the conversation seemed, with no relationship I could discern to day residue, my own memories, or even the earlier dream. I listened carefully to try to figure out what was going on. A younger girl who sounded like a teenager was arguing with an older woman about something she wanted to do. At first I assumed it was her mother but then decided it must be a caretaker after she called her "Nanny" at one point. I was not involved in the scenario, I was just listening in the dark.

Even though I didn't feel integrated into my dream body and lacked visuals altogether, the audible conversation was so vivid that I figured I must be reasonably secure in the dream state, so I figured I'd try the TOTM and see if I could coax a better REM state into effect. The fireworks task was perfect for this, since it was something I could attempt without moving much or needing anything from the environment. I imagined holding out my hand, palm up, and shooting fireworks from the center of my palm. Something did happen: I could half-see a kind of ghostly outline of my hand, like when you look at it in almost total darkness, and then above the palm emerged a faint graphic that resembled a model of the solar system, with the planets hanging in space and lines indicating their orbits.

It's hard to describe what "seeing" this was like, since it was neither seeing in the usual sense, nor was it merely thinking or imagining, but something in between, or possibly different from them all. Have you ever been in a situation where it was so dark that you looked at your hand and weren't sure that you were really seeing it or your mind was just filling in the outlines where it knew they should be? It was a bit like that, but different, because in addition to my hand I could also "see" the solar system graphic, an image I would not have expected, and because ultimately I didn't feel like I was really "seeing" any of this with my eyes, even dream eyes. Part of the problem is that I still didn't feel fully embodied, so the darkness didn't just feel like an absence of light, but like a condition—inner darkness as opposed to outer darkness? Even at the time I suspected I wasn't in full REM. The visual impression was there, but it didn't register as genuinely visual.

I decided that I must not be dreaming deeply enough to see properly, and this gave rise to a more substantial physical sensation of lying in my bed, as though I had woken up, yet I knew clearly that I was still in the dream state. I had half a mind to try fireworks again right then and there, and half a mind to better integrate with the dream body, so it seemed like what happened next was an amalgamation of the two intentions. I was focusing on my hands and they began to rotate rapidly, not the normal rotation permitted by the wrist joint, but a full 360-degree rotation, as though they were propellers. They were moving so fast that I could feel the vibrations throughout my whole body.

Although this result had been spontaneous and unexpected, I wondered if I could use it to leverage myself out of the bed, since apart from my weird propeller hands, I still didn't feel well-connected to the dream body. I hesitated to try any larger movements lest I accidentally move my real body and wake up. So I let my left propeller hand slacken and lifted the right, willing it to turn into something like the blade of a helicopter that might elevate me vertically out of bed. The propeller movement became wider and faster, as though my whole forearm was now spinning around the elbow, and the vibrations intensified, but I felt no sense of lift. I remembered that helicopter blades needed to be angled a certain way in order to provide lift, and tried to will my propeller arm to work similarly, but I guess I don't know enough about aerodynamics to convince myself that I could pull it off!

Since the right arm was not doing the trick on its own, I put my left arm back in play to provide more oomph. Now both my propeller arms were rotating at incredible speed and I could feel the whole bed vibrating along with my body. I couldn't believe that all this movement wasn't waking up my husband, who was lying pressed up right next to me. This is a common failing of dream logic: even when I am perfectly aware that I am dreaming, I irrationally worry that something I am doing might disrupt his sleep. Around this time I woke up for real, and of course he was over on his side of the bed, so the feeling of close physical contact had also been a dream impression.

It was unusual that the audio and physical impressions were so clear but that the visual field remained opaque. Is this an NREM state? The closest parallel I've experienced to this in the initial stage of many WILDs, right after transition, and in those cases I have also theorized that REM hadn't fully kicked in yet.

Slept from around midnight to 2:45am then got up for several hours. Returned to bed at 6:15am, after meditating a few minutes and taking some supplements (choline, Alpha-GPC, L-theanine, vitamin B complex, piracetam). Did some casual SSILD while falling asleep. Woke at 6:45am with dream.

I was in a room with dark walls, a sort of "black box" theatre, and about two-thirds of the room was full of tangled billows of blue cloth up to knee-level. Around eight people were positioned at various points in the cloth, flailing against it as though they were swimming (or drowning) in water. I knew it was a rehearsal for a play, and I felt a strong desire to join them but was restrained by a sense of propriety since I was not related to the production. I sat in a chair and reflected on how much I've always been attracted to the idea of acting even though I apparently have no talent for it.

Slowly and naturally it dawned on me that I was dreaming. The awareness brought with it a change of scene, perhaps a half-waking: I was back in my bed, but still in dream. I began to focus on animating my dream body as though it were a WILD, thrashing around in the tangled covers (not unlike how the actors had been flailing in the water-like whorls of cloth). I noted how my visual field was very chaotic, almost back to the fluctuating hypnagogic state, but the tactile field felt more stable, so I ignored the visual clutter and got out of bed. I don't need to see well to navigate my own house, whether in WL or a dream.

I wondered what to do and quickly decided to try to knock off the wine TOTM, which seemed like an easy one. So I walked swiftly to the kitchen pantry where I keep a lot of wine and reached for one at random. It was a rosé in a clear glass bottle. The level was very low, well down the shoulder, but since the cork was intact I figured it should count as a "full bottle" as specified in the TOTM. At first the bottle was the shape and size of a typical wine bottle, the more streamlined profile you usually see with burgundies, but as I set it down on the kitchen counter to get a better look, it transformed in front of my eyes to the larger, plumper form of a two-liter plastic soda bottle.

I was still determined to open it, so I picked it up and carried it over to where the corkscrew should be. It occurred to me that I should make a more detailed observation of the bottle first, since it was covered in writing printed directly on the glass. The writing was in white script of various fonts and sizes, but the white lettering against the clear glass was hard to read, especially with the level of the wine so low. The fonts were also elaborate and hard to make out. I held it up at an angle to get the best view and looked carefully. I could make out that the biggest word was "Mersault," which would make sense since (as I suspected and google confirms) this is an actual appellation in Burgundy. The next largest set of letters spelled "Farb," which reminded me of the German word for "color." I wondered if this had to do with the color of the wine, and was startled to observe that the wine was now colorless and looked exactly like water. Moreover, the bottle was starting to remind me of a water bottle. Oh dear, had I accidentally turned my wine into water? I'd better grab a different bottle! I was walking back to the pantry when I woke up.

There was actually a lot of day residue in this LD. Last night I ate out and had an elaborate meal with wine pairings: they included a rosé and a wine from a bottle that was partly empty but whose cork remained intact because the wine had been extracted with a needle and replaced with argon. Both of these details manifested directly in the dream, although I didn't recognize them as day residue until after I woke up. I just double-checked the menu and there was no Mersault, however, nor can I recall when I last had it, so I'm not sure where that came from.

Tonight I'm in a hotel and had gone to bed at 12:30am, early for me, after a big meal with lots of wine. I slept for a few hours and it was probably around 3–4am (an estimation, I didn't check) that I started water-cycling. I've found it the best way to avoid a hangover: I wake up at intervals to drink as much water as I can comfortably consume, which inevitably means also having to use the bathroom frequently once the rehydration sets in.

I had already woken a few times in the night and this waking seemed no different at first, because dream logic prevented me from realizing how odd it was that I was walking down a long hall to use the bathroom rather than just using the one in the room. Yet from the start, something made me wonder if I was dreaming. I tried jumping and levitating but it was inconclusive. It didn't occur to me to try other checks. I went in the bathroom and noticed it looked just like one I had just been dreaming about before I woke up, which also seemed suspicious, but I still felt very embodied and awake. I even noticed how clean and inviting this bathroom felt, in contrast to the unpleasant aspect they often present in dreams. I felt awake enough and had to pee urgently enough that I was tempted to just go ahead and use the facilities, reasoning that if I was actually dreaming then with careful intention I should be able limit this activity to the dream state and not accidentally release my bladder in waking life. But uncertainty made me hesitate—I couldn't afford to be wrong about this! Something still made me sense that I was dreaming, even if I couldn't seem to prove it.

I noticed a woman sitting nearby, which did not strike me as odd, but opportune. I approached her and asked, "Am I dreaming?"

"Yes." I was struck by the simple decisiveness of her answer. It was also uncharacteristically straightforward, given the usual evasiveness of my DCs.

"Thanks for being honest. Usually when I ask people in dreams—" (I used this phrase instead of "DC" because I was afraid she might it insulting to be reduced to an acronym) "—they say 'no'. Why do they do that?"

She shrugged slightly. "They're probably just nervous."

I wondered what they might have to be nervous about, but wanted to understand what made her different. "Then why were you so honest?"

"I represent your higher functions." I'm pretty sure this is what she said, or very nearly. It struck me as an oddly technical response.

This DC really intrigued me. She seemed so smart and self-aware, in contrast to the typical dullness and blandness of those I try to interact with. I looked at her closely. She was a slim young woman who appeared to be in her twenties, pretty, with glossy shoulder-length black hair and an Asian cast to her features. Her demeanor was calm, precise, and assured. I wanted a name to remember her by, so I asked: "What's your name?"

She promptly uttered a string of numbers, something like "2166309."

Perplexed by this response, I pressed, "I mean in letters." If she couldn't answer, I decided that I would name her "Murasaki." I had just been reading about the names of Japanese colors so the word was fresh on my mind; I knew it meant purple, and the woman was wearing a bright purple shirt and looked like she might be Japanese. I also recalled that "Murasaki" was a name of ancient pedigree, being the heroine of The Tale of Genji as well as the pseudonym of its courtly author. But my deliberations were unnecessary, it turned out.

"Meonarra," she said. At least that's what it sounded like.

I pressed for clarification: "Can you spell that?"

She might have started with an "M," but what followed was not a series of normal alphabetical letters. She specified particular accent marks and chemical symbols that I wasn't even familiar with. Her explanation of the spelling sounded far longer than the actual name, and at least half of it seemed to be special characters. Even listening closely, I couldn't follow it at all. I wished I had a way to record it other than my own weak memory. I reflected how people in many pre-modern cultures had developed their memories to an extraordinary degree, but we, who can almost always rely on other means of recording information, have very little ability in that regard. I wished I had a notepad to write down what she was saying, but there would be no point: I couldn't keep it with me when I woke up. So instead I just asked her to repeat herself: "Can you say that again?"

She obliged, but it sounded completely different this time, and I could swear the new spelling ended with a "D." That wasn't anything like the name I thought I'd heard. I figured if I couldn't spell it, I should at least make sure I had the pronunciation right. "Meonarra?" I asked, pronouncing the first syllables as "mee-oh." She corrected me; the first vowel was more like the "a" in "after," so it sounded like "mae-oh."

I realized that I was falling into a rut by obsessing over the name, and the dream was not going to last much longer. "Can I see you again?" I asked Meonarra. "I'd like to have a conversation sometime."

She shrank back with a stricken look, as if I'd suggested something completely inappropriate. "No! That's _____'s territory." I didn't quite catch the name, but I think it was two syllables, might have started with an "I," and sounded male. Similar to "Isaac"? But it wasn't exactly that; I don't think it was a waking-world name.

I wasn't sure what was wrong with my request, but I tried to reassure her. "I just mean to chat, like we're doing now. I'd like to see you." I realized that I was drawn to her. I couldn't tell if it was the stirrings of a romantic attraction or if it was just that I found her so interesting. But the thought awakened a sensuous impulse and I put my arms around her. I recognized that it was the dream state itself that made it so easy to slip toward this sensation, and I asked her why dreams had this quality. I can't remember how I worded the question, and can't remember her reply, if she had time to make one before I woke up.

Writing this up it perhaps sounds more bland than it felt at the time. It was one of those dreams that felt really significant, even if nothing much happened. I regret that I got so pre-occupied with her name. Although my waking mind really likes to have names for things, a tendency that bleeds over pedantically into lucidity, I'm not sure if naming things is especially useful or meaningful within dream itself. It is becoming clear, at least, that the kinds of names things have in dream are not always as clear and straightforward as our ordinary linguistic appellations of waking life. Instead they appear to operate much like written text in dreams, characterized by the shifting instability of dream logic. So it might have been better if I could have thought of more substantial questions to ask her, instead of wasting the whole dream just trying to pin down her name. I do like having something to remember her by, but what else might she have told me if I had been able to come up with a more introspective line of questioning?

It is now 6:43am (it was a few minutes before 5:12 when I started so I've spent over 90 minutes writing!) and the sky outside has blossomed into an unbelievably beautiful pink sunrise. I'm going back to bed.

Ritual: I had a vibrating alarm in my hand, but I think it was the cat that woke me, as there was still four minutes left on the alarm when I got up after the end of the dream. The cat is a likely culprit, since he frequently comes and meows at me several times in the morning, even after he's been fed. Whatever it was, luckily I had the presence of mind to remember not to move, and if the cat was meowing, somehow I did a great job of tuning him out. I focused on trying to maintain a state just below the threshhold of full waking that would allow me to DEILD.

My DEILD technique developed unintentionally out of my WILDs, since I had always instinctively chained them through inadvertant half-wakings. For this reason it feels natural to try to DEILD by "separating" my sense of the dream body from my physical one rather than incubating visual impressions, since I do WILDs the same way, so I started by trying to move my dream-limbs. I wasn't entirely sure if it was working, as it felt a lot like I was really moving, but it also seemed suspiciously easy and I wasn't getting tangled in the bedcovers. Eventually I was raising my knees alternately until it felt almost like I was marching in place. I had the impression that I was lying on my back while doing this, although it is almost certain that in WL I was actually lying on my side.

I hadn't been dreaming right before I half-woke, at least as far as I could recall, so there was no particular scenario to dwell on. Instead I just let imagery form randomly. There was a series of brightly-colored hypnagogic scenes that for some reason were all very cartoon-like. None of them turned into a dream, nor did I expect them to. All my thrashing was with the intent to integrate myself well enough into the dream body that I could "get up" out of bed.

(Actually as I was writing this account I did remember a non-lucid dream that must have occurred in the previous sleep period. But I didn't remember it at the time so it did not influence the attempt.)

I thought I could be more certain I was really dreaming if I moved in an unnatural way, so I tried some rotations. I was unable to rotate laterally, but eventually managed to rotate around my body's vertical axis until it felt like I was lying on my face. This was especially interesting because the whole time I was convinced I felt the cat standing on me, so the impression of his weight went from being located in my chest to on my back. At this point things seemed sufficiently unnatural that I was confident I was dreaming, so I continued to roll horizontally to the side until I fell right out of the bed. It still felt remarkably lifelike, but my landing was much too soft and painless to be real... in RL I'd likely suffer serious injury if I rolled out of the bed that way, since the bed is quite high and I suspect I'd hit my head on the bedside table on the way down!

DEILD: As I scrambled up from the floor, I noted that my mind felt very clear but my senses were vague. I danced a bit as I left the room, since I was still trying to transfer sensation and awareness fully from my sleeping self to my dream body. I still had a shadow of a doubt that I might be confused and actually awake, so I was slightly concerned about the prospect of leaving the house naked. However, I didn't feel like bothering with clothes if I was dreaming, and I figured as soon as I left the house I'd know for sure, because in my dreams the landscape outside is usually different.

Sure enough, as I stepped out the sliding door from the kitchen, instead of the concrete pool patio I found myself standing next to a steep hillside heavily overgrown with brush and small trees. I started climbing it and the earth was loose and leafy enough that it was easy to get purchase on it even though the slope was extremely steep; it seemed like a 60 degree incline. I remembered that my goal was to reach a winter forest, and promptly noticed the patches of wet snow on the ground, like those that appear when it has snowed recently but much of it has already melted. I momentarily wonder if I will be cold without clothes on, but remind myself that my dream persona is often a vampire, so the cold shouldn't bother me.

I have elaborate tasks stored up: there are a lot of things I plan to do in the forest, like another attempt at my lucid dare and perhaps "Hansel and Gretel" for the TOTY. But the snow reminds me of the TOTM, and I recall that was the reason I had specified a "winter" forest in the first place. I decide that it would be nice to get wings again and that the basic task won't be too hard to accomplish as long as I can find a DC to throw a snowball at. I scoop up some snow and pack it into a ball. The texture feels a little off as the snow comes together, too smooth and almost slick, rather than with the crunch of real snow.

(WLR: I realize that the odd texture of my snowball was probably influenced by dolphin's post on the TOTM thread where he says that his snowball ended up being a rice ball! I think the plasticky texture was also influenced by a knickknack I saw the other day in a Paper Source store: it was a little snowman made of some sort of white latex-like material that you could build up into shapes and then it would slowly "melt" again.)

Snowball in hand, I need to find some DCs. I look around but there is no one in sight. However I see a couple houses in the distance, off the to left beyond some open ground. I come down from the hill and go that way instead, in the direction of the houses. I figure I can ring the doorbell of one of the houses and lob the snowball at whoever opens the door—a bit rude, perhaps, but it will get the job done! But soon the problem is simplified when I see two DCs walking directly toward me, women dressed in business casual. I feel a bit anxious that something might go wrong before I get close enough to hit them with the snowball. Maybe I should just throw it now? I try to remember how the TOTM was worded: did it specify that the snowball needed to hit? [In retrospect I see that it does.]

While I vacillate we are still walking toward one another, and soon it looks like they are in range, so I throw the snowball. It misses, so I quickly make another and try again. It misses as well, so I pack a third one and aim more carefully. This time the snowball strikes the woman walking on the left on the lapel of her teal-colored suit jacket. The women seem nonplussed at first, but instead of protesting they soon start making snowballs of their own to throw at me, so we have an old-fashioned snowball fight.

Meanwhile two more DCs, middle-aged men, are approaching from another direction, and quickly get drawn into our game. One of the men seems annoyed initially when he is struck by a snowball, but before long he is participating enthusiastically and exclaiming, "I love this! I love this!" as though rediscovering the pleasures of childhood. The other man is older and well-dressed, with a strong accent that sounds not quite German but something in that neighborhood. He says, "Uh... apologies for staring. A rigorous loser, poor loser." I can make out his words distinctly but I don't know what he's referring to, and at this point I wake up.

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.

Ritual: This was my third experiment with the vibrating alarm. Again it was successful, though in a somewhat inexplicable way. I had intended to get lucid but slept from 1:00–6:20am, and realized when I woke it was too late for a proper WBTB. So I used the vibrating alarm, set to go off in 45m. It was 7:19am when I awoke again, so it must have triggered, but I never felt the vibration at all this time. I had an NLD I don't clearly recall, and then a DILD—in which I simply became aware that I was dreaming, with no particular RC or "aha!" moment. The lucidity was low-grade, though, in that I never remembered the tasks I had intended to work on.

DILD: I found myself in K&L in San Francisco. (This is a real wine store that I like, but the dream version had no physical resemblance to RL.) While browsing I noticed all the good food in the cases—fresh food, like slices of cake on plates, ready to be eaten—and reflected on how amazing the food culture is in SF that you can even get great fresh food in a wine shop. There was a tray with samples of wine, generous pours of about two ounces in full-size glasses, and another tray with samples of a variety of little cut bars and pastries. As I began eating and drinking, the impression dawned on me that I was dreaming, but I felt that I was not fully integrated. (This must have been dream logic; I was already deep in dream so there was no question of integration, but apparently what I was sensing was that I was not fully lucid.) I thought that using my senses would help, so I was focusing on the tastes and textures and even the sounds that occurred as I sampled the various confections. I wanted to find one that was more savory than sweet. A couple pieces were green in color, which seemed promising, but they turned out to be more dessert-like than I had hoped. I was amused to notice how I was behaving with dream protocols: if I didn't like a piece, I would just spit it out and leave it on the tray, an act that would be incredibly rude and disgusting in waking life!

I thought after I got better integrated I should go explore the dream—wasn't there something I was dreaming about earlier, a wilderness landscape, that it would be interesting to get back to? I recollected it only vaguely. But first I wanted to try each of the food samples. The very last one I tasted was savory after all, and had a kind of bi-layer construction with a spicy-savory mixture sitting on top of a nest of dried coconut strands—it was my favorite, and I wished I could get the recipe.

Nearby was a little display box full of pamphlets or maybe even CDs about nuns, and as I leafed through them I saw that they broached the question: do nuns wear their habits even when they are locked away together in their nunneries, or do they, like Muslim women, remove their head coverings when at home? I felt that in waking life I knew the answer but now I couldn't remember. I thought about it and considered that the tradition of nuns covering their head must be related to similar phenomena in related cultures and places, such as the way women have to cover their heads when attending a Russian Orthodox church service. I figured it probably did have ties to the tradition among conservative Islamic women to cover their heads. I concluded on this basis that nuns would indeed remove their wimples when alone among themselves. (In retrospect I'm pretty sure I wrong, but I can't say with absolute certainty. The only Christian nuns I've met don't wear habits at all!)

Earlier, when I had decided that I would go explore the dreamscape after I was done here, as if in direct response to my thoughts a horse had promptly cantered up outside the shop and stood there waiting for me. (If only my human DCs were so obliging!) Now that I was finished eating I went outside and prepared to ride away. The horse had been completed tacked up when he arrived—excessively so, I had thought, as he seemed to be carrying bedrolls and other long-distance gear—and when I mounted he had definitely been wearing a saddle because I distinctly braced my foot in the stirrup and held the pommel to get on. However, no sooner had I started riding away than I felt I was slipping around a bit and was surprised to discover that this was because I was riding bareback. Oh well, it will be good practice. I remembered how some people say that LDs can help you practice RL skills, and I figured that I could certainly use some practice improving my seat and position, so I decided to focus on that for a while and see if it paid off in this week's lesson.

I still felt we were in downtown San Francisco but everything felt old-timey. Even the cars looked like 1920s models. Fortunately there weren't many of them, because I was moving through the city at a canter. I realized how unrealistic this was: in RL I would hesitate to stress the horse's legs by cantering on hard paved streets, and I definitely would not cross intersections without stopping, like I was doing now, but since I knew I was dreaming I felt it would be okay. Crossing the street still felt dangerous as there were sometimes cars coming, but there weren't too many of them and they were going slow enough that we were able to dodge one another. I was cantering because that is the gait where I need the most improvement on my seat and position: I was focusing on trying to keep my legs long and heels down, with my core on, back straight and shoulders back.

We cantered right out of the city, though I was paying so much attention to my form that I didn't have much to spare for my surroundings. Just as in RL I noticed the tendency for my legs to creep up and my torso to lean forward at the canter, so I was trying to counter these bad habits and reinforce good ones. At some point I finally halted the horse, and I worked on trying to do that properly as well, keeping my seat deep and using my weight properly. The dream ended around this time, as though by halting the horse I halted the dream.

Ritual: Second try with the vibrating timer, successful but strange experience. This time it seemed to work not so much from going off (in fact I doubt it ever did), but because my anticipation of the trigger kept my mind alert during the process of falling asleep—to the point where I thought I was still awake long after I had evidently slipped into dream.

It's becoming apparent that anticipation can serve the same function as motivation. Actually my motivation was relatively low, for the same reason as last time: it is the busiest part of my work week and I realized that I wasn't sure I wanted to have to spend a long time writing up my dream report if successful. I went to bed a little after 12:30am, and woke up naturally around 5:40. (I checked the clock but can't recall the precise time, I think it was somewhere between 5:37 and 5:43.) I decided it was too late to do full WBTB and recognized my lack of motivation, so I just shoved the MotivAider in my pillow and went back to bed with no further technique, letting things take their own course.

Although normally I would fall back asleep in seconds or minutes at most after such a brief WBTB, I noticed that now I was oddly wakeful... it seemed like just waiting for the device to go off, even though it was set so that it wouldn't trigger initially until 45 minutes had passed, was keeping me awake. After a few minutes trying to get comfortable I grabbed the sleep mask from my bedside table because I knew the sun would come up soon. I then spent a very long time trying to get back to sleep... or so I thought. In retrospect it is apparent that for much of this period I was experiencing that obscure counterpart of a false awakening, a "false falling asleep" (FFA).

FFA: I think I must have actually fallen asleep very quickly, since a lot of the things I experienced while I thought I was trying to fall asleep turn out to be have been things I dreamed. For instance, at one point I was convinced that I was lying in bed with my body rotated in the opposite direction, my head facing the foot of the bed, but then I fixed this without really moving my limbs... a maneuver that would have been impossible to do physically.

Eventually I decided that I ought to have a back-up EILD method so I tried to program my sleeping mask. I reached up and pried apart the velcro near the top to flick the "on" switch, remembering to hold it down four seconds to enter "nap mode." I couldn't tell if I saw the indicator lights or not... I thought I did, but the impression was vague. Did I have the brightness set too low? Oh well, I don't remember how to change it. I'll just turn it off and turn it back on again to be sure. Hmm, same thing, the lights are vague... I'm not sure if I'm really seeing them or just imagining it. And then I realize... hang on... I'm not even wearing the Remee, this is just an ordinary cloth sleep mask! So I tried to correct the situation by putting my Remee on under the regular mask... and I really thought I had done this until, while writing this report, I began to have doubts and went to check. Sure enough, the Remee hasn't been touched all night! At least I can verify that I was wearing the ordinary mask, since that one has been moved and is now lying on my bedstand where I must have left it after waking up.

At another point in the FFA I even felt the MotivAider finally go off. The vibrations felt lengthened and distorted again. I ignored them since I thought I was still awake, and hoped I would be asleep by the time it went off next. In retrospect I realize I must have dreamed even this, because the MotivAider could not have gone off until 45 minutes had passed (even on random mode it initially counts down the full maximum set interval), and I got up to start writing this report at 6:14am, less than 45 minutes after going back to bed around 5:40... so it is very unlikely that it actually went off in that whole period!

I was getting annoyed with how long it was taking (or so I thought) to fall asleep, and eventually in my impatience I decided to just start "practicing" WILD separations in my imagination. I tried to envision an almost physical pull on my dream body that would tug it up from the lying position into a standing one, and after each repetition of this I imagined myself landing with both feet on the bed with the flourish of a gymnast who has just finished an acrobatic move. It felt at first like I was only visualizing this rather than experiencing it: as though I were just going through the motions, practicing for when I got closer to falling asleep... but before long the sense of immersion set in, and I realized that I was already in a light WILD state. I was surprised that I had been able to move so easily from full wakefulness to full REM, still unaware that I had evidently already been dreaming for quite some time already!

WILD: Since I was under the impression that I had only just transitioned into a dream state, my initial goal was just to improve immersion and stabilization, so without trying to do any tasks at first I simply wandered through the house. I soon half-woke and had to separate again. I used the same visualization as before "pulling myself up" from lying down to standing up, but it went more smoothly and easily this time. Once again I landed like a gymnast, but this time rather than landing on the bed I vaulted right out of it and onto the bedroom floor.

By this time I felt immersed enough to start working on tasks. One of the TOTMs is to dress in a costume, and I had decided in advance that I wanted to dress like a witch, so I went to the "costume closet" where I keep my clothes that are too dressy or impractical for everyday use. At first I was surprised to see (so I thought) nothing but the clothes that are there in waking life. I must have been a bit confused, because although in WL the closet contains plenty of gothy-looking wraps and dresses entirely suitable for a witch costume, the only thing I thought to grab at the time was a small halter top of some colorful iridescent material. I didn't put it on yet, since my priority was to find a mask.

The closet actually contains a box of masks on the upper shelf, but in the dream I "remembered" that I had a brown paper bag of them on the floor, so I went through it until I found a witch mask... or was it? Looking at it again, I thought it actually looked more like a Darth Vader mask that someone had clumsily tried to convert into a witch face with dabs of green paint. But then I "remembered" using it as a witch mask before, so I figured it would be adequate.

Next I needed the pointy hat. I must have one around here somewhere... I dug through the closet, but couldn't find one of the right shape. Nevermind, I can make one! I pulled out a fedora made of black leather, and started trying to pull the top to make it longer and more pointy. At first the material was resistant but I put some focus into the act and soon was able to mold the hat into a proper Halloween-style witch hat, and put it on my head. The fact that it was made of black leather made me feel extra stylish. I paused at the door of the room and wondered if I needed to change my clothes as well, but when I looked down I saw that I was wearing a long black dress that already looked witchy enough, so I never had to put on that stupid halter top!

After walking back out to the kitchen, I remembered to check my reflection in the mirror (in a spot where there is no mirror in WL). It wasn't bad! I looked like that classic witch from the Wizard of Oz: green face, hooked nose, tall hat. The mask was looking much less Vader-like now, and at this point I noticed that there was even an inscription on it (entirely legible in the mirror rather than inverted by the reflection) that gave the title "Witch," and was signed either "Robert" or "Richard." I assumed the name must be that of the local artist who made the mask, and was reassured by the title that it had been intended as a witch mask after all.

When people were contributing suggestions for the October TOTMs, I had really liked the one about flying on a broomstick to a witches' gathering, so this was something I had planned to do once I got in costume. But now I wasn't sure. Maybe it would be fun to work on my lucid dare instead, and go startle some elves with my witch costume! I felt indecisive. And in either case I'll have to leave the house, so which door should I use? I've let myself get into the bad habit of being paranoid that leaving the house might destabilize the dream, so I wondered if leaving by a door I don't often use would help bypass this impression. I know that this worry is a wholly self-imposed obstacle—and moreover that it is not supported by the evidence—yet I also know that even letting myself worry about destabilization can have a destabilizing effect!

While I'm standing there trying to make up my mind, I notice that the scenery outside the kitchen door has already begun to change. Replacing the back patio is now a beautiful summer forest, with green leaves, mossy trunks and a clear limpid pool of water on the ground, like a natural spring. The water is only a few inches deep and appears completely transparent and pure. The scene is so lovely that I immediately let go of my pointless worries and go outside to enjoy it, kneeling in the water and running my hands through it, lifting it in my palms and letting it splash back into the pool. I find myself wondering if these surroundings will transform my costume from that of an ugly old green witch into a young beautiful forest witch. And what do we mean by "witch," anyway? I start pondering the question: aren't those two archetypes (ugly old witch and young beautiful witch) from the same tradition? Don't they both imply a woman with an unusually strong connection to the natural world?

I still haven't decided if I want to look for a witch gathering or an elven gathering in this forest, as I think both could conceivably be taking place here. Would the elves resent my presence if I'm still a Halloween-style witch? But if this pool has transformed me into a beautiful forest witch, maybe I would blend right in. (I regret now that it never occurred to me to check my reflection again in the pool! Though I still had the impression that I was wearing the same black dress.)

Once again the dream distracted me from my thoughts, this time by the sound of a voice singing. It was an attractive male voice, a low tenor, drifting from somewhere up above. The pool where I knelt was at the foot of a rocky ledge, at least ten feet high, and it seemed like the main part of the forest was up there. I flew up (I can't recall if I used a broomstick or just levitated as usual) to see if I could locate the singer. I followed the voice and soon found myself in a green mossy glade. I could not see anyone but I could hear the voice distinctly, so I took note of the words:

On the new sensation lying within,
One can ride a stream of water, straight and thin.

There was another half line of verse after this but on waking it faded before I could record it. I think it had something to do with the feeling or awareness produced by the "new sensation" mentioned in the first line. I woke up before I could listen to any more of the song or continue to look for the singer.

Note: It was still very early after I finished writing all my notes, so I went back to bed. I had some NLDs and at one point as I was starting to wake up from one I found myself thinking about the song again. At this time I got the impression that the missing line might have been: And so a new feeling is won. Of course there's no way to confirm if that's what it was originally, but it's the best I've got to go on!

After reading about Tlaloc's homebrew EILD technique, I wanted to try something similar, so I compared the devices available on Amazon and settled on the "MotivAider." Although bulky and overpriced, I liked that the vibration length and intensity are fully customizable, and the fact that it has an option to go off at random intervals. It recently arrived in the mail, so I read the instructions before going to bed last night, but decided to wait until my WBTB to program it, since I figured the task would help reawaken my mind as well as focus my intention.

Went to bed at 1:30am, woke naturally at 5am. I realized my motivation wasn't as high as I had anticipated because I remembered how much work I needed to get done before the weekend was over, and reasoned that sleeping in after a long WBTB and writing a dream report if successful would really cut into my available time. However, the MotivAider beckoned, so I decided to do a very short WBTB, just long enough to program it and set it up before going back to sleep. I set the vibration to its minimal length (two seconds), programmed it to go off in random intervals up to 45 minutes, and placed it in the case of my leg pillow, where I should be able to feel it through the fabric. (I am a side sleeper and always use an extra pillow between my knees.) I thought the vibration would be too disruptive if it was near my head, so I wanted it somewhere closer to my feet. I returned to bed at 5:20am. I lay awake for a while with anticipation, and eventually decided I had better also put the vibration on its weakest setting, so I reprogrammed the device by the light of my phone.

At some point I must have drifted off to sleep, and then I felt the device go off. But something had gone wrong: the vibrations were pulsing repetitively without cease. I tried to ignore them, but they seemed to be going on for over a minute. I decided I must have programmed the device incorrectly, so I got up and took it out of the pillow, setting it aside. Tomorrow I could figure out what the problem was.

Shortly after that I was walking through the house, and I noticed something odd. Glancing through the sliding glass door in the kitchen, I saw that the water level of the river next to the house had risen way too high. In fact, the water was coming right up to the base of the door, like it was on the verge of flooding in. This observation was so startling that it made me realize I must be dreaming... maybe the EILD had worked after all! Had I ever really gotten up, or had it all been an FA?

In retrospect there was something very intriguingly incomplete about the observation that prompted me realize that I was dreaming. Through the door, I could see a vast sea of water that I interpreted as a wide river, with just a strip of land visible a mile or two distant on the other side. The water looked entirely natural, brownish-hued, its surface sleek and reflective of the warm pre-dawn light. At no point, even after I fully realized I was dreaming, did it occur to me that there is no such river next to the house, much less a broad vista of this kind... the only body of water visible in that direction is an in-ground pool of the conventional turquoise hue on a concrete patio bounded by thick trees that block any view further into the distance. Yet only thing that seemed odd to me in the dream, even after getting lucid, was the high level of the encroaching water, not the improbable existence of the vast river!

Probably because I have been thinking about dream music again, I was inspired to turn my observation into a song. "If there's water near the house, it's a dream," I sang, repeating the line several times to reinforce the association, just in case it came up again in the future. Then I wondered which tasks to work on. I decided to try StephL's lucid dare (enter an enchanted forest, look for an elven gathering and learn a new song from them), which I thought would pair well with the October bonus TOTM (create a song on a musical instrument that doesn't exist in waking life). No sooner did my thoughts turn to the bonus task than I could actually hear ambient music in the air around me, like notes plucked from a stringed instrument. Perhaps I should have paused and investigated—I could probably have found a suitable instrument to fulfill the task—but I already had a plan in mind for getting to the enchanted forest, so I walked out of the house through the front door.

Traveling to a forest on foot hasn't been working well for me in my TOTY attempts (I tried it in Hansel and Gretel a couple times), so I had been pondering alternate strategies. One possibility simply involved growing trees around me in the house until the environment around me transforms into a forest, but another approach I found appealing was to try to use the little fir tree growing outside the front door as a portal.

It was three or four years ago that I bought this little tree at the grocery store one December and that year used it as a miniature Christmas tree (at the time it was only about two feet tall). Afterwards I put it outside in the front yard. Improbably it thrived, more than doubling in size, and apparently seemed to be doing well with no care other than being watered by the automatic sprinklers that went on briefly every morning, so I left it alone. Then one day I went to move it and discovered the secret reason it was flourishing: its roots had apparently gone right through the bottom of the pot and grown directly into the ground! I am impressed by the resourcefulness of this sapling, so I had the idea of approaching it in a dream and asking it to transport me to the enchanted forest.

When I opened the front door, I was surprised to see snow on the ground. This is probably because last night I was looking up pictures based on the search term "winter forest" to incubate appropriate visual impressions. However, since I live in a climate where snow is impossible (it has been in the nineties the last couple days!), I immediately recognized that this was more evidence of the dream state, so I added a new line to my song: "If there's snow on the ground, it's a dream." Looking over at my little tree, I saw that it was also covered in snow, and added another line, "If there's snow in the branches, it's a dream." Since I was already singing, I saw no reason to stop. I walked over to the tree, grasped its narrow trunk, and requested in song, "Take me to the enchanted forest, the enchanted forest of dream!"

Unfortunately, I promptly woke up. Normally I might have been annoyed that the dream ended before I could accomplish anything, but this time I didn't mind because it was such an amusing first success for my new EILD device!

Sure enough, the whole experience turned out to be a false awakening: when I got up to start my report (at 6:10am), I discovered that I had never removed the device from the pillow like I remembered doing. And this indicates that it must not have malfunctioned after all, and that the extended sequence of vibrations I felt was most likely an experience of time dilation conditioned by the dream state.

Ritual: WTB 1am, woke 4:45am. Read, drank spice lassi, 7 minutes SSILD meditation, WBTB 6am. Relaxation, counting, mantra, took probably 30–45 minutes to fall fully asleep. Woke 7:30am with dreams.

Alchemy: 400mg L-Theanine, 400mg Alpha-GPC 50%, 750mg Aniracetam, taken at end of WBTB.

Notes: Two days ago I was buying ice cream in RL, and it occurred to me that I should use this as a motivator. "You can't eat any of this ice cream until you have a lucid dream!" I told myself sternly. Then last night I was thinking of eating something else for dessert, and I decided to be even more strict: "In fact, no dessert for you at all until you get lucid!" Given everything else that went into my attempt, including excitement about the brand new TOTMs, I can't estimate to what extent this reward-based strategy was a factor in the successful outcome, but it's worth experimenting with some more. Either I'll have more LDs or I'll eat fewer sweets, so it's a win-win either way!

I've been working on my mantra, and I'm currently going with variants of "Do we perceive the dream?" When going to sleep while counting I was thinking this on the off-counts, and as the hypnagogic state started to set in, at one point I noticed myself thinking: "Do we believe the skies?" ("Skies" as in the sporting equipment, so the rhyme was preserved.) This was so absurd I had to rouse myself and write it on my notepad!

By the time I started dreaming, it seemed as though there was a degree of dream-awareness from the start of the sequence, but I don't think it blossomed into full lucidity (with agency) until I remembered my tasks. There was no specific "moment of realization," and yet overall the dream felt much more like a DILD than a WILD, so I'm calling it a DILD.

DILD: I was standing in a narrow lane, enclosed on both sides by walls and buildings, in a residential area. A woman came out from a nearby house and walked past me, carrying a cat. Two other cats were running after her anxiously, so although their size suggested that they were almost fully grown, I intuited that the they must be the kittens of the cat she was carrying. The cat in her arms had wonderful markings, almost like tiger stripes. One of the ones that followed had a similar coat, a cross between tiger stripes and a Bengal's spots. A few minutes later a third cat came along, also striped.

I was so taken with looking at the cats that I didn't want to get too far behind, so I followed them and called the young boys that were with me to keep up. One of them was pushing an empty wheelbarrow but soon left off and went to chase after his friend, who had now gone ahead of me. I picked up the wheelbarrow and pushed it along for awhile, but it was of very primitive construction, all wood, even the wheel was just a disk of solid wood, so it was cumbersome. I wondered why I even needed it. I had noticed that one of the other boys who had gone ahead was giving his friend a ride in another wheelbarrow, and figured if I kept pushing mine, one of the boys would likewise ask me if they could ride in it, which would make it even more cumbersome. So I put it down and continued along the path.

There was a barn to the left, with an open door, and I decided to turn aside and explore it. This meant there would be no way of catching up with the others, but I didn't feel much urgency to do that anymore. The barn was full of old objects, and seemed to be used as storage of some kind. I remembered the TOTM and reasoned that in a rustic place like this it should be easy to find a pumpkin, so I started looking around for one. I climbed a ladder to a ledge which was serving as a shelf for additional objects, and was pleased to find that one of them was a large pumpkin. Everything else was covered with dust, which made me wonder how long the pumpkin had been sitting here. It was probably this concern that made me notice that the pumpkin was looking a bit sagging and rotten, but I recalled that the TOTM instructions didn't specify anything about the condition of the pumpkin, so I figured that it would still work!

Before I could reach for it, I noticed that it wasn't the only pumpkin: now I saw that there were three more on the shelf within arm's reach, all of them of slightly different hues and shapes. I was glad there was an alternative to reaching into the rotten pumpkin, so I grabbed the one whose appearance I found the most interesting: it was small, squat, and had a faintly bluish tinge. I figured I would start with this one, and if I didn't like the results, I had three more to work with.

Part of me wanted to just punch my fist into the pumpkin, which would have been faster but less elegant, so I forced myself to take my time and cut it open properly. I produced a knife from somewhere, without really thinking about it, and began sawing a circle around the stem, just as if I were going to begin carving a jack-o-lantern. When I completed the circle I lifted up the top section, revealing the interior of the pumpkin, and reached inside. The pumpkin was small enough that my hand barely fit, and I was groping around in the stringy goop and slimy seeds trying to find something else in there, hoping to encounter something interesting and unanticipated. All I felt were the pumpkin's ordinary innards, though.

Initially I had left my anticipations open-ended, but now that the dream was coming up empty-handed I tried to seed them with some expectations. Although it was a small pumpkin, there would be plenty of room for a ring. Might there be a ring inside? I squished all the pumpkin innards around in my hand to make sure I wasn't missing anything, but there was nothing there, nothing that wouldn't ordinarily be found in a pumpkin. The only distinguishing feature was that the stringy goop and slimy seeds, despite their very naturalistic texture, had the same bluish tinge as the pumpkin's skin. (I think this might have been day-residue, as last night I had been reading an Amazon review of a set of mala beads beads made in China that complained how the wood had soon developed a weird bluish cast.)

At that point I decided to give up on the little blue pumpkin and get started on the other three, but inconveniently I woke up. I considered getting up and writing my report, but felt that I was still in a state where it would be possible to DEILD, so I fixed the previous events in mind and let myself drift back into dream.

DEILD: This time I found myself in a place I recognized: it was the house of my maternal grandmother that I often visited as a young kid. It is a place that often shows up in my dreams. On this occasion, the theme of "blue" seemed to carry over from the last dream, as I noticed that the house now had a beautiful deep blue carpet that looked brand new. "Nice new carpet!" I said loudly, in case anyone was home. My grandmother is long dead but in waking life my uncle lives there now. In the dream, however, the house seemed quiet and empty, and no one responded to my complement.

I felt very lucid and clear, more so than in the beginning of the last dream, and remembered my standing intention to reflect on my bodily awareness. Sure enough, I could feel the characteristic tingles in my abdomen and especially in my legs that I associate with dreaming. (My hypothesis is that this "tingling" is a product of REM atonia.) I also associate this sensation with the ability to fly in dreams, so I experimentally levitated a bit, and then tried to implant the mental suggestion to be more aware of this body state while dreaming, with the aim of getting lucid more often.

Returning my attention to the environment, I wondered what task I could try next. I had been interested in the other basic task, drinking blood, but I didn't want to have to go all vampire on anyone who I might happen to encounter in this house, given that this was a place where my own relatives lived. "Perhaps if I look in the refrigerator, there'll be a cup of blood in there," I figured. It seemed a reasonable speculation, but after opening the fridge (which at the time I didn't notice was on the opposite side of the room than it is in RL), I didn't see any likely candidates. What would a cup of blood even look like? And would it still count for the task if it came from the fridge? The instructions didn't specify a source. But the idea of drinking a cup of refrigerated blood was not appealing to me, so I thought I should save this task for a more suitable occasion. I much preferred the idea of drinking it vampire-style, especially if I could get the bonus by drinking it from a supernatural creature.

Closing the fridge, I wondered what other tasks might be suitable for this environment. I remembered my lucid dare, and that struck me as a perfect idea: when I was little I always used to walk and play in the forest behind this house, so it was the perfect "enchanted" forest in which to go looking for elves. I continued walking through the house and went out the back door.

The world that greeted me once I stepped outside was startling in its freshness. The colors were deep and rich and luminous, more so than I usually see in dreams, and I was struck by the beauty of my surroundings. There were some distinct differences from RL: in the far distance I could residential areas covered in mist, as though I were looking at a town from the summit of a tall hill. The forest I hoped to find was present, but quite a bit further away than I would have expected. And walking across the grass of the wide lawn that lay before the forest was... a minotaur? I looked again. No, not quite a minotaur... it had the same general lineaments, but the head was that of a horse rather than a bull. Nevertheless, the creature was clearly supernatural, and it reminded me of the blood task again. I didn't want to miss this opportunity, since it was walking right toward me, so I approached the creature.

I didn't want to just grab the monster and start biting him, since he would surely conclude that I was attacking him and fight back, which could be counter-productive. So I went up to him and asked politely, "Sir, would you mind if I drank some of your blood? I only need a cup." He was at least seven feet tall and surely had plenty of blood to spare, so I didn't see any reason he should refuse. To my consternation, he seemed unsettled by my request and tried to demur. But I didn't want to pass up this opportunity, and figured that I had already met the demands of good sportsmanship by clarifying my intentions, so I grabbed his left arm (I was facing him, so it was the arm to my right), extended my fangs, bit him right in the crook of his elbow, and began to drink. Although he was tense and rigid, he didn't fight back, and I concluded that he must be experiencing that peculiar pleasure that the prey of vampires are often said to feel while being fed upon.

I paused to look up, gauging the creature's reaction, and was surprised to see that his appearance had changed. His head was thrown back, his eyes closed, but it was the head of an ordinary man now, no longer that of a horse. The task was to drink from a supernatural creature and see how it changed me, but it turned out he was the one that was transforming! I returned to drinking his blood before he could recover his wits and fight me off. However, the blood wasn't coming very quickly. Either I had picked a bad spot where the blood couldn't flow freely or he was still resisting me in some way, perhaps stifling its flow through the tension in his arm, which was still very stiff. I woke up before I had finished drinking, and promptly concluded that I didn't think I hadn't drunk a whole cup's worth, if we're measuring technically by eight ounces. However, it turns out that it is hard to estimate the quantity of blood you're drinking when you're getting it right from someone's arm!

Ritual: WTB 1am, WBTB 4–6am. Plenty of hypnagogic imagery but hard to fall fully asleep, last noted time at 6:45am. Woke at 7:30 with dream as follows.

Alchemy: First experiment with phenylpiracetam, 100mg. Stacked with 300mg Alpha-GPC (50%), and 200mg L-Theanine. Took in first hour of WBTB (in retrospect, I think this was too early and interfered with sleep). In second hour of WBTB, drank yerba mate tea (this was also probably overkill, as it turned out).

NLD: I was in a big auditorium. No memory of what was going on there, but I was trying to climb a big pole in the center (maybe I was already prospectively thinking of Jack and the Beanstalk?) However, I felt weak and uncoordinated, and couldn't make it up very far.

Later, I ended up in conflict with a guy. He was lean and wiry, small-framed, with a short trimmed greying beard. He and my husband had been in tiny vehicles on an indoor track and this guy, for no apparent reason, started aggressively crowding my husband into the side of the track. I was so angry I chased him. He got off his vehicle and disappeared into the crowd. I kept watching his movements and followed up until I was finally able to catch up. At the last minute I wondered if I was really going to go through with my intention to beat him up when I caught him... and decided yes, he needed to learn a lesson. So when I got close enough I immediately threw a punch, dodged his return blows, and finally knocked him down to the floor.

He had a dream device on him—I took it to be his journal, but it resembled a long strip of chromed metal, several inches wide by about sixteen inches long, with some holes running along the center area. I took it away from him as a punishment. I wanted to hide it somewhere it would be hard to find, so I took it into the women's bathroom, where he presumably wouldn't think to look. There was an incinerator in there as well as a garbage can, but I decided that I couldn't destroy his journal, no matter how much I disliked him, because dreams are too important, even his. I just wanted to inconvenience him for a while, so I put the device in an inconspicuous shelf where I figured someone would come across it eventually. There were a lot of dream herbs and supplements on the shelf, apparently free for the taking, but I reminded myself that this was a public place and anyone could have tampered with them, so I'd better leave them alone, and stick to my own at home which I know are clean.

DILD: It was around this point that I remembered to RC and realized I was dreaming. My goal was to work on the fairy tale TOTYs. I had actually come across a sandwich bag containing a handful of Giant White Beans in my RL kitchen the other day, and thought that these would be ideal to plant outside to grow the beanstalks. So after getting lucid, I headed straight for the kitchen and grabbed the bag, then went outside to plant them in the little plots of soil that abut the wall of the house. I felt like I was rushing, but the dreamstate felt shallow and unstable so I was motivated to act quickly.

In the dream it was drizzling lightly, so the soil was soft and easy to work. I planted the beans by hand, three in the first plot, and then went to the next plot to plant three more. But by the fourth bean I realized that they might take a long time to germinate if I didn't hurry things along. Fortunately I had a plan for this. I had been meaning to work with the Ars Magica Form "Herbam" for a while anyway, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Would "Creo" or "Rego" be the proper technique for this case? I decided to go with "Creo" since I was growing the beanstalks from seed.

I held my hand over the soil where I had just planted the fourth bean and intoned, "Creo herbam." After a little concentration it readily responded, a thick sprout emerging from the earth. It didn't look so much like a beanstalk as a huge stalk of asparagus, at least six inches in diameter. I figured that would be okay, as it would turn out sturdier this way... and I like asparagus. I quickly planted the other two beans in the second plot, but the stalk was growing rapidly and was already a few feet tall. There were still two more beans in the bag but I decided to save them... what if I needed to plant another stalk to get back down? Jack probably saved a few beans if he was smart.

Remembering how much trouble I had experienced attempting to climb in the previous NLD, I came up with a better idea. While the stalk was growing past chest height, I grabbed onto it and let it lift me as it grew. I wondered if this would still count for the TOTY, but figured probably, in terms of altitude I was certainly climbing, even if the stalk was doing all the work!

We went up and up. I was waiting to reach some kind of surface or platform that I could step off onto. How did this go in the story? I don't think I've ever actually read the original, and started to regret that I hadn't done a bit more research, because it was hard to imagine what kind of solid ground Jack could have encountered at the top of the stalk. Did he step onto the upper surface of the clouds? Or was there some kind of floating island? I may have been overrationalizing, but it annoyed me that I couldn't remember how this was supposed to work.

The dream seems to have responded to my confusion, because the space around me became ambiguous. I had started outdoors but now felt like I was indoors again, still on the beanstalk, which was still growing. However, it was now "growing" through what was effectively a visual loop: I noticed the same attic space passing by again and again in front of my eyes, like a skip in a record. I attempted to wait it out but it just kept repeating, so finally I figured, okay, I'll take the hint, I'll get off here.

Around this point the dreamstate was feeling very thin and shallow, and my senses felt poorly integrated. I had to focus my attention for a moment on just on staying engaged in the dream. When this awkward passage resolved, I was back in a room that somewhat resembled my RL bedroom, only now the beanstalk seemed to be growing from the middle of the bed and burst right through the ceiling. I didn't have the impression that any giant was in the vicinity. Maybe I needed to climb it again? But the hole in the ceiling was only big enough to accommodate the beanstalk. I would have to widen it if I wanted to crawl through.

This reminded me of my separate and fallback intention to work on Hansel and Gretel if the beanstalk idea went awry. My new strategy involved breaking off pieces of a house and eating it, to encourage it to turn into the gingerbread cottage of the story. I reached up with my hand to tear a piece from the edge of the hole in the ceiling. It broke off easily in my hand like rotten wood. I took a bite: it has the texture of a dry crumbly cookie but not much flavor. I tried to conjure the taste of gingerbread but I don't notice much change. I went wandering through the house looking for a witch but there's no one else home.

There's a vague section here. I can't remember if I actually ended up climbing the first stalk to end up outside on the roof, or if I just walked outside to check on the other beanstalks, but at some point I am outdoors again, and I observe that the other beanstalks I planted also grew at some point but are now brown and withered. I can't remember what became of the first one, but evidently it couldn't get me any farther than the roof. Still no giants, but I see what looks like a higher platform on top of a neighboring building. I break off a length of one of the dead stalks and try to use it to pole vault myself up onto the platform. It gets me almost to the top but not quite.

Occupying the center of the wall leading up to this platform is a very tall bookshelf, only about three or four feet in width but running all the way up to the top of the thirty or forty foot wall. After my second or third attempt to pole vault up, I realize that I can't make it all the way to the top using this method, so I get off on one of the uppermost shelves. I don't think I can finish the climb directly from here, but I have another idea. My weight is already destabilizing the bookshelf, pulling it down and me along with it, so I realize that I might be able to use the rebound effect to launch myself onto the platform. As the top of the bookshelf sinks all the way down to ground level, I climb over the top and position myself on the back of the shelf (which is level with the ground and facing up after the bookshelf has fallen all the way down). I anticipate that the whole shelf is going to rebound back into its original place, and sure enough it does. Using the force of its rebound, I jump off when I'm near the top and finally make it up onto the platform... when the dream ended.

Note: Although I managed to get a fair amount done despite adverse conditions, the dreamstate was low quality throughout. I stayed up during the WBTB about twice as long as I had originally intended, which meant I took the supplements way too early so that they were actively inhibiting sleep by the time I returned to bed, and drinking the caffeinated yerba mate on top of that was evidently a mistake. But it is hard to argue counterfactuals because sometimes if I don't overdo it, I don't get lucid at all, so it's always a tricky balancing act.

Ritual: WTB 1am, woke 4:20am, got up and read, drank spice lassi (yogurt, water, turmeric, cumin, salt), did 12 minutes seated meditation incorporation SSILD technique before returning to bed at 5:50am. Before going to bed I affirmed several times, "I vow to lucid dream," reflecting on how a vow is much more serious than an intention, a little nervous that I might inadvertantly break my vow, but reminding myself that I didn't dare, failing to go through on an intention is one thing, but you're never supposed to break your vows. I wanted to avoid supplements for the most part as that hasn't helped much lately, but I did use a few drops of Calea Zacatechichi tincture, because although I can't say for sure if it actually works, I thought the distinctive taste might contribute a useful placebo effect. I lay on my back in bed and did a series of tension-relaxation exercises, then cycled in random order through several affirmations ("I am aware / I do / I dream"). Drifted off, woke up a little, realized it was getting too bright out and my mind felt sufficiently wakeful that this might be an obstacle to sleep, so I put on my sleep mask (a device of last resort as I don't like wearing it), turned on my left side, and continued the affirmations until I fell asleep. I got a lot of distinct hypnagogic imagery and sounds every time I started to drift off, but I did not feel the physical signs of transition.

WILD, Part 1: I woke up again, thinking I might have transitioned successfully, and got out of bed. I could still distinctly feel myself wearing the sleep mask so I wondered if I was really dreaming, but realized that since it wasn't obstructing my vision, then I must be. I was tempted to rip off the mask but decided to just ignore it, and soon the sensations disappeared for the duration of the dream. Now that I was sure I was dreaming, I wanted to get started right away on my tasks. I reached behind me for my wand, a gesture familiar from a few years ago when I had been playing a lot with Harry Potter style magic. I got used the idea that my wand was sheathed just behind my right hip, so I could just reach back there at any time to draw it. However, this time I came up empty-handed. I realized that this was probably because, having just gotten out of bed, I wasn't wearing any clothes. Nevermind, I can work on that task later. By this time I'm in the kitchen, so it should be an easy matter to procure some fortune cookies!

I walk toward the kitchen counter, expecting to find a bag of fortune cookies ready to hand. Sure enough, there is a clear plastic bag right where I expect, but as I reach for it I see that it contains... what are those, pierogies? I laugh because they look almost like fortune cookies and are anything but, and it is just like dream to bait and switch this way. I pick up the bag and reach into it anyway, focusing my expectations around pulling out a proper fortune cookie, and by the time my hand closes around something, I can tell that it is falling into line: it has the dry smooth surface, distinctive shape and ridges of a fortune cookie. I pull it out and break it in half to get the fortune. I remember that I'm supposed to eat the cookie too, so I start nibbling at it while extracting the fortune, which was wedged inside the cookie in a crumpled up wad. As I smooth it, I see that the little strip of paper is covered with what looks like dabs of herb butter mixed with little shreds of nori seaweed, a kind of east-west fusion of ingredients. I'm disappointed to see that there is no writing on the paper at all, just the seasonings.

No problem, the bag contains several cookies. I'll just get another. I try again, and fortunately the next cookie contains a larger slip of paper, one that comes out properly this time and contains actual text—quite a lot of text actually, four or five lines of it. I start to read it, murmuring aloud to help fix it in memory. It starts something like: "And earth her allies rift..." It goes on from there, not making much sense, and worse, by the time I get to the second line the first one is already changing, now "her allies" looks like it has been replaced by something in German, "die Beile."

(Weird, according to my German dictionary app "die Beile" means "axes, hatchets." I've studied a bit of German, which is why I have the app, but I'm not aware that I've ever learned that word and didn't even know if it was a real one until I looked it up.)

I continue reading the fortune, and by the time I get to the end the first line has changed again even more, and I'm pretty sure so has everything else. I realize this is somewhat hopeless, the fortune was so long that it would have been hard enough to remember even if it were static, much less track all the changes, so I just determine to remember the part that I read initially, since I think I can keep at least this much in working memory: "And earth her allies rift."

By this point the fortune has transformed into a large plastic wrapper like the sort that might have wrapped a whole box of cookies, and as I continue to look at it, I'm surprised by how much additional text is written on the side in small print: mundane details like the address of the manufacturer, etc. I see a date, "1945," and note that the place of manufacture is San Francisco, which makes sense (wasn't the fortune cookie invented there?) but by now the date has already changed to "1929."

FA: Around this time I wake up and grab the notebook I keep next to the bed to start writing things down. Something's wrong, though: even though I normally open it to a blank page before sleeping, it is now open to a page wholly printed with graphics resembling some type of manga. I don't remember the notebook having graphics! I flip through to find a blank page quickly while my memories are fresh, but all the white pages are already filled with previous notes, and they are interspersed with the manga pages, like a cross between a notebook and a graphic novel. I find a space of blank color on one of the manga images, just enough room to scribble, "and earth her allies rift," but then I feel guilty about spoiling the drawing. I don't even remember what the story is, but if I write all over it I might end up regretting it.

While I'm still trying to figure out where to put down the rest of my notes, my husband comes into the room carrying two boxes wrapped in paper, like presents. Apparently this is some new game that has just arrived that he wants to play together, a console game. I remember him telling me about it earlier: the plot has something to do with cartoonish kids and their gorilla allies. It seems that the game can only be played in two-person mode, so he has come in to try to wake me up. I'm still lying in bed, so he sets the two boxes down right on top of me and starts to rip off the paper wrapping. The boxes are cubes measuring about a foot on each side, and at first I wonder why they are so large, but as he tears off the paper I can see from the box art that they contain individual devices like Playstation controllers.

Although I do want to play the game at some point, I'm annoyed at this disruption because I was in the middle of a lucid dream attempt! After jotting down my notes I had been planning to try to re-enter the dream state. However, I already vaguely suspect that this might not be a real awakening because everything seems so exaggerated, from the problems with my notebook to my husband's rude attempt to wake me. He may not share my hobby, but he's aware of it, and would be unlikely to disturb me while I'm still sleeping, much less set boxes on me! This remains only a suspicion, and I don't become fully aware of the fact that I'm still dreaming. Rather, I conclude only that I'm still on the verge of it, since I can still feel the heaviness and tingling in my limbs that lets me know that I can probably re-enter the dreamstate once this distraction has diminished. So I quietly grumble at my husband until he leaves, careful to keep calm and not lose my temper since that could wake me up too much and make it impossible to to return to the dream. After he goes out of the room, I get myself settled in the bed again and prepare to re-transition. This is amusing in retrospect because evidently I was fully dreaming the whole time—I had the impression that I was DEILDing back into the dream, but obviously if this had been a real awakening DEILD would have been impossible after such a chaotic interlude! When I felt confident I was dreaming again, I got back out of bed.

WILD, Part 2: Having done fortune cookies, I thought I should put all my focus now into completing the Patronus TOTM. Once more I reach for my wand and once again come up empty-handed. No matter, I've used a chopstick as a wand before with great success, and I keep a jar of those right on the kitchen counter, so I walk up to it and pluck a nice sturdy one. Although the jar is mostly full of delicately-pointed Japanese chopsticks, I choose a sturdier one of the Chinese type, cut half-square and half-round. It looks just like one of my real chopsticks, from a simple and practical set I acquired many years ago in Nonthaburi because I didn't know I was supposed to give them back to the door-to-door noodle vendor, and it feels comfortable and familiar in my hand.

I figure that it would be most appropriate to summon a Patronus if there were a real threat, but I don't want to over-complicate things by going to look for one. I reason that since my husband was annoying me just now with the boxes and almost woke me up, this could serve as a sufficient stand-in. So I find him in the living room, point the wand toward him and say firmly, "Expecto Patronum!" I hear an audible "pop" like something bursting but see no change in the visual field. I try again and nothing happens at all. I strengthen my resolve, try a third time, and... what is that?... I look closer... it's... moths! The air between us where I was aiming the wand is now occupied with a cloud of small shimmering moths!

I'm delighted with these results because they were so unexpected. I figured my Patronus would turn out to be something predictable like a type of animal I like, maybe a cat or an owl or a raven or even a horse, but moths had never crossed my mind! However, I had intentionally left the form of the Patronus unspecified, because I was hoping the dream would collaborate with me creatively and come up with something interesting and unanticipated, and in this respect it fulfilled its role splendidly.

Moths! I would never have consciously arrived at this solution, but now it makes perfect sense: I am very much a night person, after all, and these are definitely night moths. I watch them for a few moments, entranced by the glitter and sparkle of their silver bodies in flight. They are relatively small, with wingspans of roughly three-quarters of an inch, but there is a whole cloud of them, many dozens filling an area several feet on either side. Although we are indoors, they appear to be illuminated by moonlight. It is incredibly beautiful. And they've fulfilled the function of a Patronus, it seems, in that they have averted the "threat" (such as it was) and completely defused the tension in the room. My husband is watching them too, and appears just as enchanted with them as I am.

After admiring the moths for a while, I notice a rabbit on the living room floor. It is wonderfully well-articulated, closely resembling Dürer's famous drawing of a hare. (Probably WLR because I briefly saw that drawing yesterday.) Since I'm still holding the wand, I figure I might as well try out another HP spell. I recall that there's one that ends with "leviosa," and although I can't remember the first word, I figure it is unimportant because clearly "leviosa" is the operative term. So I point the wand at the hare and say, "Leviosa!" Sure enough, it rises right off the ground into the air. I set it back down and pet it fondly.

I now feel satisfied that I have accomplished both the tasks I had intended, and I know I should wake up now and write promptly before I forget any details. But the dream is going so well, so clear and stable and responsive... it would be a shame to leave it so soon... I give in to the temptation to take a quick look outside, just for a minute, before coming back in to wake up and begin my report.

Walking back through the kitchen, I open the screen door to the back patio. Sometimes my WILDs become more unstable after I leave the house, probably in large part because I've developed the expectation that this can happen, but in this case I plan to wake up soon anyway, so I walk outside without hesitation.

It only takes a step or two before the environment no longer resembles my backyard. I encounter a group of four DCs, a mix of men and women who appear to be in their twenties. They begin to approach or accost me in a vaguely threatening manner. I try the Patronus charm again, but it is not as effective this time: the cloud of moths is much smaller and the DCs appear unimpressed. I'm not sure if I actually see them holding wands, or only rationalize that they might be, but I figure this would be the perfect opportunity to try another HP spell. "Expelliamus!" I shout, aiming at the guy on the far left. Sure enough, his wand jumps right out of his hand toward me, and I catch it neatly. You'd think this would give the others enough warning to prepare their defenses, and indeed they seem to be scrambling to try, but I promptly disarm them all using the same technique.

I walk on a little further, and encounter a few more DCs sitting on a low brick wall and chatting. The initial four have followed me, and I get the impression that the new ones are their friends. I wonder if they are going to retaliate at me for having taken all their wands, so try the Patronus charm yet again: "Expecto Patronum!" This time only a scattering of moths appear, a half dozen or less. I feel a bit embarrassed at this poor showing. "It must be out," I muse, wondering if the wand can only conjure a limited number of moths in a given interval.

Nevermind, I've got more tricks in my arsenal, and I want to intimidate these DCs so they'll back off. I wonder if I can levitate the whole group of people? "Leviosa!" I command, trying to make them all rise in the air at once. It doesn't work, and I speculate that maybe this is like game mechanics, where it is easier to perform such effects on simple creatures like animals, but harder on a more intelligent creature like a person, since they get a free roll to resist. I think it over and decide, well, maybe so, but... I have all the wands! Their combined power should be enough to counter any resistance. Is it possible to use more than one wand simultaneously to cast a spell? Only one way to find out!

Standing in the center of the DCs, who form a ring around me, I levitate myself initially—partly to cement the idea of levitation more firmly in mind, and partly because some of them look like they might want to make a grab at me at any minute. Hovering in the air just above them, I arrange all the wands together in my right hand so that I am gripping them evenly, and try again: "Leviosa!" This time I am pleased to see the whole circle of people around me—about six or seven now I think, the initial group plus their friends—rise simultaneously several feet into the air until they are almost even with my own level. They all look discomfited and alarmed by this change of circumstances, so to reassure them that I mean no real harm I let them sink gently back down to the ground and come down as well myself, satisfied with the results of my experiment.

I decide to stop fooling around now and go back into the house to write my report. It seems dream logic has made me forget that I can just wake up whenever I want to, I don't actually have to go back bodily into the house and manually start writing. But as I turn to go, one of the girls who has returned to her seat on the brick wall yells something hostile and sarcastic after me. I figure she's upset over my levitation stunt, so I decide to use friendliness to try to transform her attitude. I walk right up to her and, maybe taking "friendliness" a little too far, kiss her on the lips. Although she just looks startled and confused now, I smile warmly and say with genuine affection, "See you later!"

Returning to what I think must be the spot where I came out of the building, I go back inside. Just in case the DCs are still feeling miffed and try to follow me in, I lock and bolt the heavy door behind me. This is no longer the sliding screen door to my kitchen, but a large and solidly made wooden door with numerous locking mechanisms. I'm not sure if I came in the right door at all, because when I turn around I see that I'm in what looks like a nineteenth-century boiler room: it is full of heavy, old-fashioned machinery. Nevermind, I'm sure I can find the entrance to my kitchen just a little further on, so I'll go through and look for it.

As I pass by some of the machines, I marvel at their intricacy and the clarity with which I can perceive how they are constructed. I pass one machine that has a cylindrical body like an old stove. Although it is made out of solid black cast iron, there is a primitive electric cord incongruously coming out of it, so I figure it must be from a period of technological transition in the late nineteenth century. The electricity is driving some kind of rotating grinder that is hidden in the upper part of the cast iron body under a round upper plate, and with a flash of insight I think I know what this is: it must be a mill of some kind! But what is it grinding? I look at it a little longer and see a lower basin, also cast iron, positioned below the cylindrical body to catch drippings of some kind: the drippings resemble hot slag, semi-melted metal. Whatever this thing is milling, it is definitely not flour!

I continue to make my way through the room, dodging complex pieces of shaped metal and machinery that crowd around closely on all sides, but when I get to the far wall I'm disconcerted to find that there's no door. How am I going to get back into my house? Although there seems to be no exit in the walls other than the door I came in, the ceiling is so far overhead as to be out of sight, and I observe that this is less a room than a vertical shaft filled with industrial machinery all the way up, so I begin to levitate and rise through the lattice of metal bars. When I get about three storeys up I see in the wall what looks like the worn wooden cover of a hatch, arched on the top and with a flat base. There is no handle and it looks like it would be too small to crawl through comfortably, but I figure I can make a portal in the wall here to pass through.

Aiming my wand at the wall, I intend for a portal to form in the location of the hatch. Although nothing appears that I would recognize as a portal, the wall changes, the area in front of me becoming transparent, and just a few feet beyond I see a vertical transparent sheet of glass, apparently the wall of a neighboring building, a modern glass-walled high-rise. Directly across from me through the glass, I see what looks like the interior of a cafe, the sort of place the people who work in this building might stop for coffee or a snack on their lunch hour. It is dark inside and empty of customers, as it is nighttime, but I notice with mild alarm that several cops are running through the cafe and aiming guns at me! They seem very deliberate, as though this was a sting operation directed at stopping me. If they shoot, they'll surely break the glass and then I'll be exposed.

I consider making the first move and breaking the glass myself to engage them, but I don't feel like getting into combat. I point my wand toward the cops with the intention of creating some kind of protective barrier between us, but I don't see any change and can't tell if this is successful. I decide to just get out of here. Making another portal directly in front of me seems like a bad idea, because the cops might shoot at any moment, so I get a bit creative and make the portal directly under my feet—all this time I have been hovering in the air, after all—and then I take what feels like a leap of faith and simply let myself fall directly into it. Would any pursuers be able to follow? As I fall, I decide that probably the best course at this point is to let the portal lead me to waking, and so I transition from feeling as though I'm falling through a round tunnel of undefined space to waking up in my bed and scrambling to start taking notes before the memories fade.

It's interesting how clear and stable my dream memory remains—even of such a complex series of episodes—for as long as I am still dreaming, and it is only on waking that the whole fabric begins to thin and fray unless it is captured immediately. Fortunately there were no problems with my notebook this time so I jotted down the key details quickly by hand and then spent the next hour and a half typing up my full draft of the report while the memories were still fresh in mind. I don't mind devoting the time (and sacrificing the sleep) for it when the dreaming is so good!