task of the month

Ritual: It was a great night for dreaming, probably because I went to bed so much earlier than usual, though I've also been especially attentive to my RCs for the last couple days. I went to bed a little before midnight, and I'm also currently on the East Coast, so the clock was three hours ahead of my usual time zone. My sleep was punctuated with the usual half-dozen wakings, though I didn't do any specific night practices other than try to pay attention to the transitions between sleeping and waking, and in this I was not persistant or prompt enough to pull off a WILD or a DEILD. But by around 6am I woke up from the first DILD, spent until 7:30am writing it down, then went back to bed and lucked into a second one.

NLD, "Drones": I'm standing by a floor-to-ceiling, wall-length window in a big hotel suite, looking out over the curve of a bay. From the height we must be somewhere between the 20th and 30th floor, and to the right I can see another tall building, or perhaps an extension of the same hotel, following the curve of the beach. Ahead and to the left is the flat horizon of the sea. It would be a pleasant view if it weren't for all the drones hovering in our field of vision, each one carrying a sign with a single word on it, white block letters on a black background. The words seem to be completely random.

"It's like some dystopian future," I comment to Peter Dinklage, who is standing to my left. I muse about what it would be like if the drones were weaponized, and turned on us like machines tend to do in science fiction. Though a chilling thought, they are awkwardly constructed without any armoring, and look like they would be easy to shoot down.

Then I notice that although they are not armed with guns, each drone is fitted with a camera, which is just as bad in some ways. Are they conducting mass surveillance on us? The cameras are all pointed directly at us. As I watch, a see a few drones of a different type fly in very close. They are not carrying signs, and they are disk-shaped, topped with a transparent dome through which we can see tiny people inside operating them. The pilots can't be human: even though I am standing next to a dwarf, they are much smaller than him, the size of babies, but with adult features and pointed ears. One of them waves at us, and Peter Dinklage says something like, "This is really disturbing."

FA-DILD, "Smallpox": Shortly after this I have the sense of waking up, though it is not a typical FA; I do not find myself in bed. I feel like I am standing in the same spot, in the same room, only awake now. Everyone else who was in the room a moment ago is gone, and there is no longer any impression of a view. The light has changed, becoming greyer and dimmer: it felt like late afternoon a moment ago, now it feels like early morning.

At once I notice that something is wrong with my body: a dense network of small patchy blisters is completely covering my skin. I look at myself in third person, as though in a mirror, and see them everywhere: covering my face, my chest, my arms, every patch of visible skin is mottled with these raised lesions. I know exactly what they are, too, I've seen them before in historical pictures: these are smallpox pustules, apparently in an early stage, since they are slightly lighter than my natural skin color and haven't scabbed or opened yet.

Immediately my rational mind rejects the scenario: didn't I get vaccinated for this? I realize I don't specifically remember getting a smallpox vaccine, but... isn't that because smallpox is extinct? I can't recall the details but I'm sure I remembered hearing that. Surely it's not making a comeback, like measles, because of all these anti-vaccers? But that can't be right—if smallpox were coming back then vaccinations for it would have become available, and I'd have been first in line.

This can't be happening. I try to will away the pustules but nothing changes. I remain unconvinced. This can't be happening, it must be a dream. If I can levitate, I will know it is a dream: I put my mind to it and though I do not levitate properly, I can feel that gravity is definitely different from waking life. So it is a dream! Okay, that's what I thought. Thank goodness I don't really have smallpox. Now I just need to fix my appearance.

I go into the bathroom and look in the mirror, trying to will my skin smooth again. The pustules are stubbornly persistant, but a lock of hair turns white and I decide to transform the rest of it for fun. It instantly turns stark white, but the texture remains smooth and silky. This gives me the idea to turn my skin jet black, like that of a drow elf. I concentrate and most of it transforms, but there are still pale patches on my forehead and upper cheeks, and when I look down at my legs, they are a streaky grey that is fading out toward the ankles, more like body paint than skin pigment.

On the bright side, changing the color of my skin finally got rid of the pustules, leaving it smooth again. Now I just want to even out the color, but the pale patches resist my initial attempts to darken them through will alone. I try to use my hands, as though spreading pigment over the resistant areas, and this helps a bit, but it is not an easy fix. As I peer closer into the mirror during this process, I notice that my eyes are solid black. I can't remember if this was the correct color for drow eyes, but I really like the effect. By the time I complete the skin transformation, my hair has faded from snow white to a yellower bone white, and this looks better and more natural with the jet black eyes and skin.

During this process my hair has been going through stylistic variations, always long and straight, but hanging down in different ways, and smeared with substances like blood or oil. I figure this makes sense for drow fashion, since living underground they probably don't bathe all that often, making hair treatments like oil very practical, whereas the bloody streaks look impressively gruesome. Although my skin won't stay pure black, it doesn't fully revert to its natural shade either, but retains traces of color, like streaky orange-browns on a muted blue base, while the hair stays yellowish-white.

WBTB: I woke up and spent over an hour writing the report of the last dream, but afterwards it was still early enough to go back to bed. Although I was not sleepy, it was a pleasantly lazy morning, and I enjoyed drifting in hypnagogic imagery. There was a period of ambiguity where it became increasingly difficulty to tell if I was having waking or dreaming experiences, and then I slipped again into full dream.

DILD, "Bed Monsters": I was wandering through the large house belonging to my in-laws where I am currently staying, and I had lost count of the number of bedrooms... there had to be more than twenty. Just how big was this place? At that moment I realized, no, of course it is not so big in waking life, it is because I am dreaming that the size has been exaggerated. Dreaming, eh? Wasn't there something I had meant to do, if I found myself dreaming in a bedroom? Suddenly I recalled this month's TOTM, to make friends with the monster under your bed. Oh! I should get back to the room where I'd been sleeping! I dashed back so quickly I was afraid I would destabilize the dream, but luckily it stayed intact.

I peered under the bed but it was a pleasant open space. It looked like there were a few banal things stored under there, but nothing looked sinister or monstrous. I felt around for something to work with, and my hand closed around a small plush object, which I withdrew and examined closely. It was a small brown teddy bear, only five inches long, with a plump, pear-shaped body and tiny beady eyes. There was a lighter brown oval around the bit of stiching that served as a nose. I was impressed with the detail with which I could perceive it, but had no idea how was I supposed to "make friends" with it. It seemed totally inert, a harmless stuffed animal. I set it on the thick folds of the comforter piled on the bed. "Dance!" I commanded. It just sat there. "Dance!" I tried a few more times, but it remained inaminate.

I walked around to the other side of the bed, setting down the teddy bear on a dresser. I turned away for a moment, and when I looked again it had changed: now it was a sort of bell-shaped plastic structure hanging from the ceiling by a string. I couldn't tell what its purpose was, but it still appeared to be an inert object.

It occurred to me that I had been walking around and standing right next to the bed completely heedless of the space underneath. If there really were monsters under there, I'd have to watch out for my ankles! I wondered if this was the problem, that I didn't really have any lingering childhood fear of monsters under the bed. Perhaps I should try again with more intent.

I bent down and looked under the bed from this side, trying to keep the idea of monsters in mind. I still didn't see much under there: it was a light and airy space, just like in waking life, completely different from the overstuffed space under my bed at home. But I did see a scrap of cloth within arm's reach, so pulled it out. It turned out to be a little crocheted cat, only about three inches long, white with some orange spots. I guessed it must have been made by a total amateur. The body seemed floppy like it was unstuffed, and as I turned it over in my hands, I discovered that it was actually crocheted in a single flat piece with the four little legs sticking out horizontally, so only when it was folded in half along the back did it look plausibly like a cat. The head was the only piece that appeared to have been crocheted with any semblance of three-dimensionality. As I studied it closely, I saw tiny points of bright green contrasting with the dominant the white and orange: there was a little green tuft on the trip of the tail, and projecting from the head was a narrow appendange like the antenna of a cartoon alien, also topped with a green point.

However, this object also showed no sign of motion or life, so it would be hard to say I was "making friends" with it. But then my eye caught a glimpse of orange fur near my feet: my cat had appeared! I wasn't surprised that she had turned up: when thinking about the task in waking life, I had reasoned that she really was the monster under my bed. Though I adopted her when she was about five months old (the best guess of the shelter) she had been living in a feral state before that, and even after five years of comfortable indoor living she still has the edgy instincts of a street cat: she hisses at the slightest provocation, and holes up under the bed for hours whenever a stranger is in the house.

I knelt down to ruffle her long, soft fur, which felt totally life-like, but I noticed the color was off. In the dream she was calico, with big orange patches, but I remembered that she was a tabby in waking life. I wondered if she could qualify as my dream bed monster—though right now she was acting very pleasant and relaxed, and I figured it probably wouldn't count because I had already made friends with her in WL.

Yet again I peeked under the bed, and this time at last I found the perfect candidate for my experiment. I felt that it was connected somehow with the tame cat at my feet, as though all her feral qualities had separated into a different animal. This one had a tortoise-shell coat, all the same colors as a calico but in smaller, more mingled patches. Although the fur resembled that of a cat, the body suggested another animal entirely, with a narrower head and tapering snout. I was pretty sure it was a fox. Best of all, it was already hissing and snarling at me! This was the monster I had been looking for!

Now all I had to do was make friends with it. I began calling to it in the cooing, overly affectionate voice I might use with my cat. "Come here... lovely sweetie... lovely sweetie. I have treats for you my love... treats for you my love." The animal reacted as any feral creature would, holding its ground and continuing to hiss and snarl. I could see the tension locked into its body, poised for fight or flight. I reasoned that since it was a dream monster, the best approach would be to hug it, but that wasn't obviously wasn't going to be possible while it was still under the bed. I needed to draw it out first.

I reached under the bed and the animal snapped at the air and threatened to bite me. I considered drawing my hand back for a different approach but decided to let it go ahead and bite, inspired by that wonderful scene in Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind where Nausicaa tames the fox-squirrel by remaining calm and patient when it bites her finger. Plus, since it was a dream I didn't have to worry about physical harm. So I kept reaching toward the animal until it bit down on the middle of my left index finger. The pain was surprisingly clear and sharp, but easily manageable. I kept thinking of that scene from Nausicaa and projecting similar expectations on this situation. I felt the animal relax enough to take a few steps closer to me, but it had not yet emerged from under the bed when the dream abruptly faded. Intriguingly, even after I had fully transitioned to wakefulness, I could still feel a distinct itch in the second joint of my left index finger where the animal had bitten me.

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Ritual: WTB 12am, WBTB 4–5:30am (working), woke 6:15am with dream.

I dreamed I was working in a museum and I had assembled a collection of objects to show people. I had left a bunch of things lying outdoors on a forest path and wanted to bring them in, so I grabbed an armful of tall leather boots (there were least six pairs in different styles) and walked back to the museum. By the time I reached my destination I was only carrying one pair, and thought I must have dropped the others along the way. I wasn't sure where to store the boots I had brought back, but I looked around and decided to lock them up in a tall armoire of Japanese design. I opened up the doors and there was another set of doors behind the first, and another set behind that, three in all before I reached the interior.

I decided to take my car to go back and get the rest of the stuff since I had left a lot of things lying on the path and I wasn't doing a good job of bringing them back by hand. I have a third-person impression of watching my car wind its way through a narrow gorge: at times I was afraid the rocks were too close together for the car to fit, but I found it easy to lift the car off the ground and twist it as needed to avoid the rocky outcroppings. After getting safely through the narrow rocks I felt very pleased with my success, and decided that I should spend more time driving like this, using the wind as propulsion. This jogged my memory: wind! Wasn't that one of this month's TOTMs? At that moment I became lucid and decided to attempt the task.

I raised my arms and called out in a loud voice, "Wind!" I remembered that the task required not using any active power to fly, but letting the wind pick me up and carry me wherever it might be going. So after summoning the wind, I waited passively but invited it to lift my body in the air. The air picked me right up like I was as weightless as a feather, and I relaxed into it. It was wonderfully pleasant and enjoyable to be buoyed up in this way. Curiously I looked around me, wondering where we might be going. I have the impression of thick flocks of birds darkening in the air in what seemed like abstract geometric patterns.

I recalled that the bonus task also involved mastering the elements, and wondered if I could use this same wind to knock things down on the land below without getting buffeted too much while I was floating in it. I peered down at the trees, which appeared to be somewhere between 50 to 100 feet below me (I'm terrible at estimating vertical distances). They were in full green leaf and showed no sign of being blown about excessively by the wind at its current strength. I thought it would be a shame to knock down such beautiful trees, and before I could convince myself otherwise, I felt the air around me destabilizing and woke up.

Ritual: WTB 2am, woke 9am with dream. Recall: 9/10. April had so far been a dryspell, but after my hot streak in early March I hadn't worried too much about it. I've noticed that my streaks and dryspells often seem to operate cyclically. I was distressed in early April when even my dream recall was inexplicably poor, but for the past week that had been improving. I had been continuing daytime RCs but to no discernible effect, and hadn't made any serious LD attempts all month.

Last night was no exception, but since I was stressed and annoyed over work obligations, I let myself drink rather heavily with dinner. The consequence of this was that I slept poorly, having to cycle lots of water and wake up even more frequently than usual. This didn't bother me either, as I'd slept plenty in the last few days and didn't feel especially tired. I also enjoyed that I was dreaming heavily all night, with decent recall, though the dreams themselves were not interesting enough to sacrifice more sleep to record them. As morning approached, the line between sleeping and waking started to blur, to the point where I found myself in a long dream where I seemed to be lying half-awake in my bed, but talking and interacting with DCs who were in the room with me. Even before the dream ended it occurred to me that it had involved some semi-lucid intervals, so I realized I should get up and take some notes. I was in the process of doing so when I began to suspect I was still dreaming. My first instinct was to wake myself up so I could record the dream properly, but then I realized that I shouldn't squander this unexpected opportunity!

DILD: In my living room. Don't think I'm awake yet. Could wake myself up, of course. Hang on—that would be a waste. Must be at least an hour before I have to get up. What were those tasks again?

Jogging will be easy enough. I start running even before I leave the house. Suddenly my feet feel heavy and I notice I am wearing my old black leather combat boots. Grin—if there was any doubt I was dreaming it has cleared up now. [For the record, I was never in the military, I just had a distinctive fashion sense in my youth.] Go outside the door and jog away. Immediately nothing like my backyard, though it does still resemble the region I live in. Look around: in the distance see a woman pushing a stroller. "Woman pushing a stroller," I say to myself, to fix the details. I'm running across a parking lot, and where it ends I pass an unusual tree whose thick branches are armed with long thorns. "Thorn tree," I state for the record. Find myself at the edge of a steep hill and run straight down. Gravity isn't a problem, I stay perpendicular to the ground I am covering, which means I am pitched forward at a 45 degree angle and would fall flat onto my stomach if gravity were operative, but it isn't. I can feel my body being gently buoyed up into this position, and my speed doesn't become too great. Say, "Steep hill." As I'm running down the hill, looking around, I see something stranger. The earth is almost barren, with dry scrubby vegetation in patches, but looking to my left, I see razors sticking up out of the ground as if someone has planted them there, dozens of them, several inches apart, covering a large patch of ground. "Razors planted in the ground," I say, adding, "Disposable razors." And they're not just any brand, but I recognize them: distinctive yellow handles, white heads... "Bic razors," I think.

At the bottom of the hill the ground levels out. I notice that the act of jogging doesn't feel at all realistic, which is interesting because I actually do jog in WL on a semi-regular basis, so it is not that my dreaming mind lacks sensations to draw upon. In what respect is it unrealistic? Well, there's no need for real effort, no sense of real weight. And now, unbidden, my arms are dangling and dragging through the dry dirt of the ground, I can feel it sifting through my fingers. My arms do not feel any longer than normal, and my legs do not feel any shorter than normal, yet my fingers are trailing the ground alongside me as I run. I notice a small mushroom lying on the dirt and pick it up, saying "Mushroom." It is a fleshy beige tube-shaped stem without a distinct cap, and I recognize the type from the grocery store—it is a small eryngii mushroom.

Previously I had passed highways at the base of the hill, but now I'm approaching a smaller local street, buildings tightly packed together on the side of the street across from me. I decide to move on to another task. When the April TOTMs were posted I had worked out a plan whereby I would use the portable hole to portal myself into space and do the bonus task. I note an ideal location in the street—there's a manhole cover there or some other kind of circular mark that seems the ideal place to set down the hole. I notice three guys on this side of the road are getting into a parked car and feel instinctive momentary caution about running in front of it, but remind myself that this is a dream, there's no way to be harmed if the car hits me, and anyway I should use it as motivation to succeed quickly in the hole task. In retrospect, I note that the direction they're about to drive suggests either that this must be a one-way street, or else that the traffic flow is the opposite of what it normally is in the US.

I had planned my strategy as I was jogging up, so once I got to the spot I had designated, I promptly used my right hand to reach into my "pocket" (to avoid overcomplicating things I deliberately didn't bother to take notice of what I was wearing or make sure it had a pocket, I just let assumption carry the day), pulled out my portable hole and dropped it. Nothing happened, but the problem was easily diagnosed: my hand had come up empty from my pocket, so I had only been pretending to drop the hole. Apparently, in dreams, there can somehow still be a distinction (however nuanced) between "pretending" to do something and "actually" doing it.

"You actually have to pull something out," I murmured to myself reprovingly, and reached into my pocket again. This time my hand closed around a folded piece of very thin black cloth. I recall the texture of the cloth made it feel like a synthetic fiber, smooth and slightly shiny. I unfolded it and dropped it on the pavement. It was circular, perfectly sized to fit over the manhole-cover spot in the street, but I had thrown it so casually that it had fallen in a bunched up and wrinkled way, so I kneeled down to gently smooth it flat. Then I stood back up and stepped on the cloth, intending to sink through it and find myself in space. Of course the first time, it felt no different than stepping onto a layer of cloth that had been set onto the pavement, and I didn't go anywhere. This didn't surprise me, since I knew my expectations might have been conditioned by some of the early TOTM reports I had read in this month's thread. So I patiently tried again, knowing I could make this work. I hopped in place and focused on the sensation of sinking. The second try was still a dud. I hopped again, maintaining my focus and emphasizing the idea of falling through the hole. It worked, though instead of falling suddenly, as one might through a real hole, I was sinking slowly and gently downward. I used this extra time to build my image of where I wanted to end up: space.

After I sank beneath the surface of the pavement, I was floating in a pitch black, unconstructed space. This was more promising than disorienting—after all, outer space has very similar qualities. However, I knew I should be seeing stars, so I firmed my resolve to be in space, specifically "outer space," not just unconstructed space. The dream complied, and filling my field of view to the front and right was a sudden glimpse of a great starry disk, fully round as if I was looking at it head on. "Galaxy," I murmured, impressed by how beautiful it was, how awe-inspiring, even if it had been generated entirely by my own mind. But the task required me to observe a sunrise over Earth, so I focused my intention using keywords: "Space. Sunrise."

The beautiful galaxy disappeared, replaced with a vision much less inspiring. From photographs I have the impression that seeing the actual Earth from space is visually stunning, but despite the loveliness of my galaxy, my model of Earth was rather dull and unconvincing. What made it so underwhelming was that I didn't feel like the distances were right: even though I was still floating in "space," I felt like I was only a few feet away from the planet, which resembled a large globe about six feet in diameter. It was dark, because I was looking at the night side, and as I willed the "sunrise" to occur, the light creeping around the edge of the planet illuminated something unexpected: the whole planet seemed fenced in by structures built over and around it, and they were covered with corporate logos! Actually it seemed very appropriate metaphor for the current state of affairs. The structures definitely didn't look like the sorts of things that could exist in space, though, since they consisted of large interlocking beams that crowded and dwarfed the planet itself. As I examined this structure, the "space" in which I was floating stabilized into the interior of a large, dimly lit room, the earth and the structures around it becoming mere models. It resembled the lobby of a planetarium or space museum.

"Space. Sunrise." I said again firmly, trying to restore the scene to the one I had intended. I temporarily succeeded in making the room fade away so that I was again floating in darkness in front of the Earth, but when I tried to re-do the sunrise, the growing light illuminated the walls of the same room that I had just banished, and now the light was almost aggressively bright. This, I figured, was actual light from WL—during my earlier wakings I had noticed that it was a very bright morning, and my curtains can only do so much to keep light out of the bedroom. I managed to ignore the light and hold onto the dream a little bit longer, but I was still wrestling to turn the room's interior back into outer space when I woke up.

Ritual: Too tired to work late so WTB 12am, woke 4am to finish work. WBTB at 6:15, woke 7:15am with first DILD.

DILD, "Mirror Lake": Woke up with fragile recall... as I was getting down notes from the end of the dream, ended up forgetting much of what came before. Thought about it and some scenes came back, but there might be gaps.

I recall an NLD at my grandma's house involving lots of cats and kittens of all sizes and personalities. I was trying to negotiate conflicts between them and protect the kittens from dogs who seemed on the verge of trying to eat them. I woke at one point (though I now suspect this was an FA) and reflected, oh, those were such obvious dream signs (grandma's house & cats), I should be more attentive.

Not sure exactly when I became lucid; it might have happened around this point. I recall lying in bed, thinking it was just like my real bed but instinctively aware that I was dreaming. (In retrospect, typically, room and bed were nothing like WL.) I lay on my back staring at the complex patterns that were playing across the ceiling in black and white, complex and shifting geometric abstractions.

From there the scene changed. I recall the transition clearly, because I found it interesting how I went from lying flat on my back to sitting in a partially reclining chair in a movie theater without ever feeling as though my body had changed position. Corresponding with my new angle of vision, the patterns on the ceiling have now reoriented to become the images on the movie screen, and transformed from abstract to representational. When I was lying in bed I had the impression that my husband was sleeping to my right (odd because in WL he sleeps on my left); now he is sitting on my right in the movie theatre. The rest of the room was empty in the earlier scene, even lacking furniture apart from the bed: the movie theatre, by contrast, is packed with people.

Having experienced all this so distinctively, especially the odd ambivalence of change/no change in my position, I become curious about my dream body and feel it with my hands. How lifelike is it? I'm impressed with its solidity and the distinct way I can feel the muscles moving under my skin as I twist in my seat. (In retrospect, the muscular movement may have been exaggerated.)

Even though I'm only touching my side and hip, the attention to my body makes me feel slightly aroused, and I am reminded of the recent forum thread where the OP asked if it was possible to maintain lucidity through orgasm. Certainly, I had replied. Though I've done it before, some years ago, eventually I decided not to get distracted by dream sex so it's been a while. It now occurred to me to see if I could still do it, if only as an exercise in maintaining stability. I hesitated momentarily since I was in such a public place, but shrugged off those concerns—this is my dream, how much more private can you get?—and indeed no one around me notices or reacts as I move my hand discreetly downward.

All it takes is a few minutes of pressure with my fingers to get myself off. I watch the images on the movie screen to make sure I don't lose focus on the dream. The intensity passes and the dream remains stable. I once again marvel at how easy it is to orgasm in dream compared to the cumbersome efforts required of the physical body. After the movie ends—I don't recall the story at all—I leave the theater. I remember being impressed at how long the dream lasts and how continuous the spaces feel, though in retrospect I don't clearly remember all the ground I covered.

The next thing I remember is a scene inspired by day residue from work. I talk briefly with colleagues, mostly people that I observe have no correspondence to WL. When I get bored with this and turn to leave, a woman asks, "You're leaving already?" I go out the door carrying a large textbook in one hand. I briefly consider discarding it, but decide to keep it with me for now.

Beyond the doorway I find myself in the hallway of a university building. It's hard to say if it is dorms or classrooms, but there are lots of flyers and decorations all over the walls. I note the peculiarities of my vision: the environment is really stable, with lots of detail, but everything is a bit dim and out of focus. I'm deciding what to do next and recall the mirror TOTM. There are always public restrooms in hallways like this, and there will undoubtedly be a mirror in the restroom, so I walk down the hallway and look for a likely door.

I reach a corner where the corridor takes a right turn to the left, so I continue in that direction. After turning the corner, I encounter something unexpected: the hall is much darker here, as if the lights have gone out, and the way forward is block with big stacks of boxes. Interesting... why is the dream trying to stop me from going down this hall? Curious, I levitate and cross the barrier easily—the boxes were only stacked high enough to be an obstacle to someone on foot.

A voice calls out from the darkness behind the boxes, apparently a guy stationed at a desk there to make sure no one gets past. "You can't go back there," he warns me.

"Why?" I ask, genuinely wanting to know the answer. The barriers the dream is throwing in my way are becoming more and more intriguing!

His excuse is really lame and boring: "There are books being deposited."

"Okay," I respond indifferently. I ignore him and continue to levitate down the hallway. Halfway down I encounter a door on my right. Will the guard pursue me? I have the the impression that he starts to get up from his desk, but I've moved so quickly that I have a big lead already. To further distract and delay him, I throw the big textbook I've been carrying in his direction. Helpfully, this frees up my hands so that I can open the door.

I have the impression that the door was supposed to be locked, but I bypass it effortlessly. As I twist the knob and push the door open, I can feel the distinct tickle of thick cobwebs brushing my right hand. This gives me a creepy thrill... is there actually some peril here? Why would the dream try to keep me out of this room? Just past the door is a pair of light switches on the wall to my right. I flip them but nothing happens. Typical.

Although the room is darker than the hall outside, I can still vaguely see. It is unremarkable: just a storeroom with a few boxes stacked here and there. However, one detail draws my attention: it is very thing I was looking for, a mirror! The mirror is large, at least 3x8 feet, and lying flat on the floor in an arbitrary position as though it is merely being stored here. This is great, I can try the TOTM! I've used mirrors as portals before, but they were always vertically aligned. The fact that this mirror is flat on the floor suggests a new way of using it: instead of pushing or walking through, as is natural with vertical mirrors, I should just run over and jump in as though it were a pool of water. I figure it will work as long as I can avoid any doubts or second thoughts.

I take a running jump and fall into the mirror's surface. My alignment isn't perfect—I end up on my back sinking half into the mirror, half into the floor, but I don't let this bother me. There is a momentary disorientation of unconstructed dream space, then I watch curiously as a new environment begins to coalesce, wondering where I'll find myself.

It was predictable, really: after thinking about the mirror-portal as a pool of water, that is exactly where I end up. I am floating on my back on the surface of a very calm body of water, like a pond, and I can hear a stream bubbling somewhere nearby. This is actually quite peaceful and relaxing, and I think how nice it would be to float here for a while... but I'm already waking up.

FA: There is a brief FA where I hear my husband's breathing on my right—still the inverse of our actual positions in WL—and then I wake up for real.

Interlude: From 7:15 to 8am I wake and write the notes from the last dream, then return to bed. It is hard to fall asleep, taking about half an hour. Everytime I get close to sleep, some unexpected noise wakes me: my husband's alarm clock; a text message; and finally an unrelenting sequence of pounding and clattering at the house next door, as though someone is alternately assembling and destroying a pile of scrap metal.

Spoiler for Sexual content:

DILD, "Coitus Interruptus": I find myself at home with my husband, but fully aware that I'm dreaming. I decide to expand on my sexual experimentation in the last dream, and see if I can maintain the same stability with a partner. "Do you want to have sex?" I ask, and at his affirmation, I begin taking off my clothes. The disrobing becomes tedious and seems to be taking an excessive degree of time and effort—it's a dream, can't I just will them away? But I feel like it is important to take my time and do this properly (I was probably wrong about that). Moreover, the dream is not cooperating: after getting my shirt and socks off I start to struggle with my pants, but even as I do so, I can feel myself wearing a shirt and socks again! Nevermind, I tell myself, only the pants really need to come off. I lose patience with how much effort this is taking and try to will them off, but the frustration wakes me up—

—or so I think. Getting out of bed, I have to ask... am I really awake? I can't be sure (only in retrospect does it become clear that the layout of the room was all wrong). Looking around for dream signs, I see a ceramic catfood bowl stacked within a metal one (catfood bowls shouldn't be in the bedroom at all but I fail to realize that!) What has caught my eye is the fact that the ceramic bowl is cracked. I don't remember the bowl being cracked... is this really happening? (Actually, I noticed yesterday an unexpected crack in a WL wooden bowl, so this must be DR.) I go over to the bowl and tug on the cracked area. Pieces fall to the floor, everything acting very natural and lifelike. If I'm going to figure out whether this is a dream, I have to try something more drastic. I point my finger at one of the shards and will it to levitate. Sure enough, it promptly rises into the air and floats wherever my finger directs it. Awesome! So I really am dreaming! Suspicions confirmed, I walk straight to my husband's office: "Want to try again?" Clothes are no obstacle this time since I am still nude from getting out of bed, but at the moment of penetration I wake up—

—or so I think. I'm lying in bed, but I can tell I'm not completely awake, because I'm seeing some random page of text in front of my eyes. I must still be dreaming. I'm enjoying the facility with which I've been able to detect and maintain FAs in this dream. I return to my husband's office to continue the experiment. This time he isn't there. I try to imagine us having sex in the absence of his DC, but it is not the least bit convincing, no different from "imagining" in WL. I find this odd. DCs are mental projections, so shouldn't I be able to compensate with my mind alone? Apparently it is more complicated than that.

I go back to the bedroom and find my husband there. I propose sex but he claims he is spent, apparently from our last encounters. I insist, and he goes along. This time we manage full penetration, and oddly, at the same moment I feel a corresponding sensation of fullness in my mouth. I figure the act must be triggering an association with oral sex. At the moment it feels distracting and uncomfortable, and since it doesn't go away on its own, I reach into my mouth to try to manually pluck out the sensation. This is even worse: it feels like I am tugging on my own esophagus, so I stop. I wake up—

—but did I? After that chain of FAs I wait and try to be sure. This feels more like real wakefulness, and I can feel the weight and warmth of the cat lying on me, in the position he took as I was falling asleep. I decide I'm truly awake this time, review the memories briefly, and get up to write at 9:30am. This time I notice a physical sensation of sexual arousal, which was lacking after the earlier dream. I wonder if it is because I woke up in mid-experiment or because it was not successfully resolved this time.

Ritual: WTB 11:30pm, WBTB 5–5:45am. Took supplements (l-theanine, alpha-gpc, piracetam, bacopa), did about half an hour of relaxation/breathing/counting on my back. Toward the end had brief series of vivid hypnagogic images (close up of eagle's head, view of a forest) then snapped back to full wakefulness. Not worried, this always happens. Turned on my left side to fall asleep. Woke with dream at 6:30am, so I had probably been asleep for about fifteen minutes.

DILD, "Time Stop": I've just finished a multi-course meal at a nice restaurant and I'm standing a the bar afterward, where the proprietor is offering me a special drink. While she prepares it, I notice that I can barely stand, my legs are crumpling under me, and I stagger as I try to regain my balance, hoping no one will notice. I kneel at the bar, which is low enough to accommodate this, to disguise my inability to stand. This is so embarrassing... am I drunk? I think back and don't understand how that could be, since I've only had ordinary wine pairings with my meal. Then I realize the truth: ohhhh... that incredible heaviness in my legs, that's just because I'm falling asleep!

I'm relieved to understand what is going on, and also impressed that I can think so clearly about the fact that my real body is falling asleep in bed without disrupting the dream. I decide to go on with the narrative that is playing out because I really want to try this drink. The bartender sets an unusual glass in front of me. It is shaped like a particular wooden table made by Isamu Noguchi circa 1941, but with a semi-circular indentation on top for the drink. It is made of hollow light blue glass and the interior is full of crushed ice, to keep the drink cool. The whole thing is very small, like a sake cup, and the indentation looks like it holds less than an ounce of liquid.



I try the drink, which is a clear liquid, pleasantly bright and floral in taste, in flavor a bit like St. Germain but lighter-bodied and not so cloyingly sweet. I complement the bartender and ask what it is made of. "Catfish liqueur," she replies. I'm impressed! I wouldn't have guessed, as the taste was not the least bit fishy. Another girl asks how the drink is made, and narrates as the bartender shows her: "So you mix it with that blue stuff, then top with..." I look at the bottle she's indicating. It is a gallon-sized jug made of translucent plastic containing a clear liquid. It reminds me of those extra-large bottles of Heinz white vinegar, but the shape of the bottle is more like that typically used for laundry detergent. There is a graphic of naturalistic forest trees on the front of the bottle which makes it resemble the cover of a nature magazine. The brand name clearly reads: "Gesuckt." From the name I assume it is a foreign import, probably German, and wonder if I can buy it at any of my usual grocery stores.

My earlier thought about "fishiness" has now taken the form of a chunk of sardine or mackerel that I discover lodged between my gum and upper lip. I reason that it must have come from a dish I ate during the meal earlier. I prod it out with my tongue and finish chewing it. Meanwhile I'm walking away from the bar toward the restaurant area. There are a lot of people in the room, which reminds me—hey! I could try the TOTM again, see if I can do it properly this time.

"Freeze!" I say loudly, but people keep going about their business. I remember the difficulty I had with this last time, and it also reminds me that I'm supposed to be stopping time, so I switch wording. "Time stop!" I command. I say it a few times, still not getting much result, so I decide an explanation is needed, addressing the room in a loud voice so that everyone can hear. "I said 'time stop!' That means everybody stops moving. Time stop! Time stop, everybody!"

I look around and find that everyone has frozen in place. Okay, this is better, I seem to have gotten the point across. Now I'm supposed to put someone in an embarassing position. I didn't plan ahead for this, so I'm going to have to come up with an idea on the fly. My gaze falls on a stout old lady in the middle of the room. I walk over and unbutton her light blue jacket and white blouse. Inside, she's wearing a pink bra, and I'm relieved to see that it has a front closure, so I unhook it and reveal her breasts. I hope I'm not being too mean, but remind myself that it's just a dream so there will be no lasting harm.

Now I have to get everyone moving again. What's the opposite of "time stop"? I try some variants: "Uhhh... go. Start. Start moving." This works, but meanwhile I had taken my eyes off the old lady to check whether everyone else was back in motion, and when I look at her again, her clothes are already back in order and no one is reacting as if they had seen anything unusual. I chide myself for not paying closer attention. I'd better try again.

"Time stop! Time stop!" This time the DCs react much more promptly, like they're getting the hang of it. Okay, what should I do this time? I look around for ideas. Among a group of people in one corner are two meathead-looking guys. I go over and start posing them really close together, much closer than a couple of straight men would normally be comfortable with. As I move and angle their bodies, I notice that it doesn't feel so much like time has stopped as that they are just playing along while I reposition them, and there's some difficulty, maybe even slight resistance, as I lean their faces together as though they were about to kiss. Finally I get it just how I want, so that their lips are almost touching. Then I step back a few paces so that when I restart time, I'll have a clear view of both their reactions and the people around them.

This time I restart the scene with more confidence, like I'm getting the hang of this too. "Okay, renew!" I command, punctuating the signal by clapping the first two fingers of my right hand into the palm of my left. It feels like being a movie director.

I watch closely as people start moving again. I was hoping the two guys would either react with comic embarrassment or, even better, be overcome by a latent attraction and really start kissing. Instead, they simply draw away from one another without any expression or commentary, and no one around them takes any visible notice. I'm disappointed with the blasé behavior of all these DCs, but I have to admit it makes sense: they're projections of my own mind, after all, and I'm fairly blasé myself most of the time.

Observing a dog walking through the room, I momentarily wonder if I should try again, but the lackluster reactions of the DCs has sapped my motivation, and I feel that I have adequately performed the TOTM. I wonder if I should wake up and write... but the dream seems stable, and I'm reluctant to end it earlier than I have to. However, I'm aware how easy it is to start forgetting the details if I don't record them promptly, so I do the next best thing and start verbally recounting my memories of the scene, to help fix them in mind for later. As I'm doing this I end up waking anyway.

Interlude: From 6:30 to 7:15am I record my notes and then return to bed, going to sleep with no further techniques. I wake up at 8:30am from another DILD.

DILD, "Sphere": The plot has been going on for a while but I don't remember much detail from before I become lucid. I'm sitting on the toilet in the bathroom of a house that belongs to a male friend I've been hanging out with for most of the dream [!WL]. I feel guilty when I notice that I've almost used up all his toilet paper. I tell myself that I should really stop giving into the urge to use the bathroom when I'm dreaming. This isn't waking life, where it actually makes sense to go if you feel like you have to. In a dream it's completely pointless, a waste of time, and kind of gross. If I'm doing this, it's because I'm too caught up in the idea of a physical body. I'm reminded of something Sageous wrote in the forum, how he doesn't really have a body in dreams anymore. I should work on getting less attached to mine.



I get up and go over to the bathroom sink, studying my reflection in the mirror. It's actually a close resemblance, as far as I can tell through the mask that covers most of my features. The mask is reminiscent of the one worn by Michio Ito in his 1915 "Fox Dance," though mine lacks the long snout and doesn't cover my mouth. Also my eyes are clearly visible through the sockets. The fact that I am wearing a mask does not strike me as odd, and instead I ponder what to do about my body. I don't think I can eliminate the idea of it all at once, so it might be best to proceed in stages. What's the most radical distortion I can think of? I know! I'll become a sphere.

I keep watching my reflection as my face starts swelling and widening. It looks disturbing at first, like obesity or an illness, and I have to focus on making my whole body expand, not just my face. Not only can I witness this happening in the mirror, I can actually feel it. As I become rounder and rounder, I remind myself that there is no reason a sphere should only see out of two frontally positioned eyes. I should try to expand my concept of vision to include the area behind me. This only partly works: I'm now getting visual feed from what seems like the opposite side of my sphere, and can perceive the rim of the tub and a bit of the floor and shower curtain, all very close up. However in the process I lose my frontal vision, and as I try to experience both visual fields at once I become disoriented and start rotating in place, which makes sense given that I'm a sphere with nothing to stand on anymore. The disorientation gets so bad that I'm afraid it might disrupt the dream, so I let my body snap back to its familiar structure, satisfied that I had a reasonable success for my first try.

I look back in the mirror to check my appearance again. My reflection looks like it did before, and I'm still convinced that it is just like waking life—although in retrospect I realize that my dream-self had a brunette bob rather than the shoulder-length brown hair of WL. I'm still wearing the mask and want to look at the face underneath, so I take it off. There are more layers of mask under the first, and I peel them off one by one, until I'm finally just wearing glasses, and take those off too. Finally my face is uncovered, and I am satisfied that it is a good likeness. I notice an unusual vividness to my eyes, which are sparkling and happy, and I am pleased with my appearance.

Stepping outside, I realize that I'm still carrying my glasses. Should I just throw them away? I feel a natural reluctance, but remind myself that it's a dream, it doesn't matter. Then I reason that I might want to use them later: this could be a good trick to improve focus if the dream gets hazy. Sure, I could always manifest a fresh pair, but that will be easier if I condition my expectations by saving these now. So I slip the glasses into my jacket pocket.

What should I do now? I'm in a great mood and have no particular task in mind, so I decide to explore the dream world. Perched alone on a grassy hillside I see a strange building, very gaudy, with red roofs under a gold dome: it looks like a cross between an old McDonald's and a sultan's palace. I realize it is a restaurant of some kind and head over there.

I'm still feeling unusually happy and excited as I walk in, so I pump my fist and go "Woo!" My enthusiasm has been making the people around me more friendly, I notice, and remind myself that I should try to be more like this in WL. The restaurant is small inside, like a cafe, with a several tables and a counter where I go up to order. Despite the counter it is not a fast food restaurant: the menu consists of about six innovative dishes printed on a small square of white paper.

"What's the tastiest thing on the menu?" I ask, then realize I have a craving for spicy food and ask, "I mean the tastiest spicy dish."

"The D-4," replies the server. I check the menu and the description lists this as a big steak dish, which sounds too heavy and will take forever to prepare, so I look at the appetizers instead. There are only three listed, but two of them sound like they consist of just three pieces of fish, served nigiri sushi style. The fish that interests me looks like langoustine, but with the soft, ribbed texture of monkfish. The server tries to warn me that it's a very small dish, but I say, "I know. It looks like someone has already left one here," pointing to the piece sitting on the menu.

I put in my order and take a place at a small table, then get up to think this over. Can I really commit valuable dream time to sitting down for a whole meal, even a small one? Shouldn't I be doing something more productive? Maybe I should just leave. But I consider that the experience might be interesting, and I can even try to combine it with a task—the circumstances are ideal to work on summoning, something I've always struggled with.

I walk back over and tell the server, "Actually, I'm here to meet somebody." I pull out my phone, wondering who to call among the characters I've tried (unsuccessfully) to summon over the years. But then I notice that someone is already sitting at my table, so I go over to see who it is. I've never seen this guy before: he looks like he's in his twenties, with straight, mousy-brown hair and thin, very pointed features.

"Hi, are you here to meet me?" He nods.

Okay, I think, rolling with the circumstances, this could work. I'll meet someone new, like a blind date. "What's your name?" I inquire.

"I'm Denny, a crass ass." He looks bashfully down at the table.

This odd term rings a bell. Didn't I, much earlier in the dream, long before I got lucid, meet a guy named Paul who used the exact same term for himself? What an oddity; I don't think I've ever heard that term in life. What could it mean?

"Did you say, 'a crass ass'?" I ask, enunciating clearly. The young man nods.

"Why would you call yourself that?" I am genuinely mystified.

"It's what my friends call me."

Unfortunately I woke up before I could find out anything more!

Ritual: WTB 12:30am, woke ~6am and set vibrating alarm for 40 minutes. I don't have a clear memory of it going off the first time (~6:40). The second time it went off (~7:20) I seem to have experienced it entirely within the dream state. My lucidity lapsed shortly thereafter but came back when I noticed that the circumstances were suitable for one of the TOTMs. I must have dreamed for about ten minutes after the alarm went off the second time, waking at ~7:30 with 29 minutes left on the alarm going into its third 40 minute cycle.

NLD: I was on a bus traveling through a desert. Looking out the window, I saw an enormous lizard resembling an early-model godzilla. [DR: an image of a similar godzilla was shown briefly John Oliver's show on Sunday night.] It didn't look real, because on closer inspection its "skin" was wrinkled and rippling like that of inflatable parade float rather than a living creature. I concluded that it must be a world boss and looked away. Even though it was so much larger than me and very far off, I was afraid that my scrutiny might draw its attention, and I was not equipped to battle it without a raid.

Our destination was a cave, which was pleasantly cool and dark after the burning light and heat of the desert outside. I passed through the large front cavern through a door labeled "Imagemakers" that led into a back room. These "imagemakers" were literally cave painters, a studio full of artists each doing individual murals on the walls, but in a modern, Asian-inspired style. [DR: One painting seemed reminiscent of Toshio Aoki's Thunder Kami (1900), which I was looking at yesterday.]

I comment to one of the artists how pleasantly cool it is here in the back room. She replies, "It's only 25, if you're not careful you might freeze." [DR? I had reviewed the TOTMs before bed and my notes used the word "freeze," which also ended up being the task I attempted later in the same dream.] I assume she means Celsius because it's not that cold in here, and try to remember what that would be in Fahrenheit—72 or so? I point out to her that when I start to feel cold I can just put on more clothes. Outside in the heat, there was nothing I could do, so this is preferable.

EILD-FA: I feel the vibrating alarm and "wake up," or so I believe, though it retrospect it was obviously an FA because I was in a room with no resemblance to WL. I am sitting in bed reading a book, and after I feel the vibration I remember not to move at first, lest I break REMA. As I start to feel more confident in my dream senses, I venture to turn the page of the book. Slowly I expand my range of motion until I'm sure that I'm not going to disrupt the dream. The plot of the previous dream continues (insofar as it has any continuity, which isn't much) and I soon lose what little lucidity the alarm had prompted.

NLD: Now everyone's talking about a bride who is coming, also on a bus, and someone instructs me to go to a counter to buy a present for her, "a small dog." I had envisioned a tiny dog that was only a few inches long, but the two available at the counter aren't small by any reckoning; they must weigh 40 or 50 pounds. The clerk asks me what I want the dog to be able to do. I think this over, rationalizing that it is a gift to someone who might not be expecting it, so it would be best if it isn't too high maintenance. "Ummm.... sleep a lot?" is my first suggestion. I try to think of other possibilities. "Stand up? Lick? Can they do that?" The clerk looks at me and answers in a tone that suggests he thinks I am an idiot, "Yeah, they can all do that."

While I'm deliberating someone has come up and bought one of the two dogs, so I'm stuck with the one that is left. I think it's really ugly, with shaggy beige fur, and I hope the bride likes it or I'll be stuck with it. At least the dog has a good personality, friendly and responsive, nuzzling up to me like it wants to be liked. I go to another room and start talking with two girls. Suddenly the dog starts humping the floor, which embarrasses me. "I hope he doesn't do that around her," I say, meaning the bride. One of the girls laughts comments that the way she's been carrying on with her new husband, she probably won't be offended.

DILD: As the conversation continues, I suddenly notice: hey, I'm in a room with DCs, this would be a perfect opportunity to try the "freeze" TOTM. I mean, okay, there's only two of them, but we are in a room, so that should qualify as a "roomful."

"Freeze!" I say suddenly, interrupting whatever else we were talking about. The girls stare at me with looks that say "WTF." They're still moving normally, so I issue the command again, attempting to focus my will by tensing my body. That doesn't work either, and I realize that I have the wrong approach. I need to be focusing my mind, not my body. "Freeeeeze," I say cajolingly, drawing out the word. At this point they do stop moving, but I have the impression that they're just playing along. I decide to try the narration technique. "Your body feels so heavy, you can't move. You're paralyzed, like when you sleep." That reminds me, of course we're not completely paralyzed when we sleep, and I'd better not kill them by overdoing it. I hastily add, "You can breathe, of course, just like when you're sleeping."

The girls seem to be complying now, so I study them closely to be sure. I also remember that I should take conscious note of their names, which I had instinctively known earlier in the dream but had almost forgotten on going lucid. The smaller one on the left, with the dark hair... I think back and all I can come up with is "Calm." It sounds odd, but that's the only name that I remember for her. The plumper girl on the right, a blonde, I know for sure is called "Amy."

The smaller girl seems completely comatose now. I lift her arm and drop it, and it falls with satisfying limpness. The larger girl is also lying still, but I get the impression she's just pretending: one of her arms is in a position that could only be maintained by exerting muscle control. I lift it and it is stiff in my grasp.

Then I realize I'm going about this all wrong. I try to remember the specifics of the TOTM. Was I just supposed to freeze them in place, or was there something about actually stopping time? I can't clearly remember the wording. I decide I'd better try the latter in any case, it might work better—and I won't have to worry about the girls accidentally suffocating if time itself has stopped.

"Freeze!" I shout, now indicating not only the two of them but the whole environment, with only myself as an exception. I find that the logical impossibility of this trouble me: if I continue moving normally, then in what sense can time itself be said to have stopped? It doesn't make any sense. I remind myself that this is a dream, and I'm not obliged to work out the physics of it. I look at Amy to see if my new strategy has resulted in any improvement. No, although she is lying quite still, and her arm looks properly limp now, she's actually tapping the fingers of one hand.

"Freeze!" I shout again, looking directly at her hand. Still tapping. "Freeze!" I yell, glaring at the hand. Tap... tap... tap. "Freeze!" I insist, mustering all my intent. The hand finally goes limp. It occurs to me that at some point I'm going to need to write all this up, and the thought wakes me.

Notes: I never did remember the second part of the TOTM, not just in the dream but even after waking up, recording my notes, and going about my day... but I had the feeling that there might have been more to it, that I left something out, and on coming home from work and checking the forum, I see that there was a whole second part of the task that I skipped!

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.

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.

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!

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, 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!