Summerlander's Experiment

Date: 24/06/2021
Bedtime: 1am
Awakening: 7.15am
Return to bed: 9.30am
Method of entry: direct
Attempt: successful
Awakening: 1pm
Duration: 2mins 53secs

WAKING STATE

After a school run and having watched a podcast on YouTube, I return to bed with the intention to directly enter the phase. I relax laying on my back, which is not a sleeping position for me, and observe my thoughts come and go in a meditative exercise. My mind gets lost in thought several times but instances of hypnagogia restore my wakeful focus and simultaneously cancel the visual illusions that manifest during the state. In my relaxed attempt, I aim to fall asleep, but it doesn't take long before a pulsatile hiss amplifies in my head and I take the opportunity to separate from my perceived body position by getting up.

PHASE STATE

The loud sizzling in my head indicates that I'm in the phase state, but I have doubts upon getting up and opening my eyes because the bedroom looks 100% realistic. I see my mobile phone resting on my bedside cabinet and it appears to be made of rubber. 'Did it melt under a sunbeam?' I ask myself. I pick up the object and squeeze it; it feels malleable—like a phone made of tar—and my fingers go right through it. Despite entertaining the possibility that I simply got up in the real world and that my phone might have melted under natural circumstances, I decide to perform a reality check, just in case, by pushing my index finger against my palm. To my surprise, the digit impossibly passes through my phantom hand, confirming the surroundings to be a very elaborate illusion.

I push open the balcony door and jump on top of the balustrade in order to jump. There is a moment's hesitation—because in waking life the fall would kill me!—but I remind myself about the nature of what is perceived. Moon-like gravity helps me to land softly in the middle of the road (an impossible feat that would probably shatter my ribcage against the wooden fence in the real world). The sky is overcast and the neighbourhood is pretty much identical to what actually exists. During a gradual take-off to fly towards Crane Park, I notice a heavyset woman, donning a large hat, gawking at me in apparent disbelief. I continue upwards, going over the tallest trees I've ever seen which are part of a vast forest that looks nothing like the actual Crane Park. After a jolly, untrammelled flight, I eventually land in an interesting market square teeming with characters. I feel a bit lost and fall asleep.

DREAM STATE

I'm in a taxi cab with my family, following a road up a hill. There is some kind of commotion taking place outside as the driver travels carefully. There is armed police and military on the streets and people run around in a state of panic. I hear shots fired and we duck slightly inside the moving vehicle. I get my wife's attention to what I witness ahead of us: an armed squad fired their rifles and subsequently break into a house. We move past it and I wish for the cab driver to speed up so that we can all feel safe again.

PHASE STATE

I wake up with my wife asking me if I'm okay because apparently I'd been weirdly talking in my sleep. I get out of bed as she speaks and decide to test reality by pushing a finger through a palm again just in case I'm in a false awakening; as my index anomalously goes through my hand, the truth of the phase is clear. I waste no time in going through a wall behind which I expected to find my youngest son's bedroom, but I find a strange elongated room with bunk beds redolent of what I used to sleep in as a teenager. Near the bedroom door, I see my daughter sitting in front of her mirrored make-up desk. 'Hi, dad!' As I ignore the filial doppelgänger, I remember Project Elijah's task of attempting to recall my last dinner. 'Salmon, potatoes and salad!' I say aloud, believing the recollection to be accurate.

I pass through the yellow door of the strange room and emerge in a posh foyer. As I head towards a mahogany door, believing it to be the exit, a tall man in a dark overcoat tries to stop me. The top of his head is bald and he sports bushy sideburns; his countenance resembles that of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's. 'Son, where are you going?' I'm not in the mood to socialise with this character and I fear that a mindless plot could develop, potentially sidetracking me from the goal of flying. I push the front door open—causing it to swing outwards—and exit the building, but the man continues to pester me as he follows right behind. 'Son, come back!' I turn around and wave my index finger to make him levitate a few feet off the ground; he looks petrified so I magically put him down and grab his collar before growling, 'I'm not your son!' I leave him visibly shaken on stony steps in front of the strange house I had just exited. I feel powerful.

I glide through roads and an alley with a couple of beggars before encountering the familiar market square where I'd lost focus earlier. I run through another alley whilst rubbing hands together to maintain the phase. At the other end I find a gorgeous parkland with a few people milling about under a clear blue sky. I run and propel myself into the air, gaining some distance from the ground, but soon a loss of control causes flying to become curvilinear, and a nearby white building warps with my impending approach—making me feel like my presence refracts the light from objects in close proximity. Just when I think I might crash with my legs higher than my head, I begin to somersault in mid-air, which is accompanied by the realistic sensation of witnessing sky and ground trading places consecutively. Eventually, I land on my feet, over green grass, and notice a grinning Halle Berry lookalike staring at me. 'What's your name?' I ask. 'Power!' Came the reply. I glide towards her and we engage in an amatory embrace before I wake up.

WAKING STATE

I make notes about the experience and realise that my last dinner recollection in the phase state had been accurate. I also feel happy that a deliberate attempt at the direct method had been successful.

Date: 15/09/2021
Bedtime: 2.45am
Awakening: 7.15am
Return to bed: 9.15am
Method of entry: dream consciousness
Awakening: 11.30am
Attempt: successful
Phase experience: The Relative Experiment
Duration: 55 seconds

WAKING STATE

I return home from a school run with a strong intention to enter the phase state and carry out the experiment set by Project Elijah. I feel too awake when I lie down on my back so I decide to relax and meditate.

PHASE STATE

I am resting on my side with my eyes shut and hear a male 'radio' voice in my head. It's reassuring me that together we can overcome any problems and ended with, 'Don't worry, I'm always here if you need me ... I've got your back.' I feel like I have discovered a strong ally from my subconscious and take the voice seriously enough as a possible helper that I might wish to summon in the future. As I remain still, pondering about the nature of my own mind, I fall asleep.

DREAM STATE

Me and my wife are in the back of a red convertible, speeding down a motorway under sunny weather and facing the rear end of the vehicle as we watch a long stretch of road from our backseats. Our chauffeur, who seems to be a good driver, is unknown. Suddenly, I notice a naked man holding on to the side of the car. I leap in his direction and, fearing he might be trying to hijack our ride, attempt to kick him off it. The nude character proves to be quite agile and swiftly jumps to the bonnet and holds on for dear life. I begin to cautiously approach the miscreant in the hope that I might be able to strike him but this one moves to the driver's side. He holds on to the side mirror and struggles with the driver; wasting no time, I come to the rescue, managing to push him off the vehicle as it grinds to a halt with sirens growing louder.

The police is right behind us and the naked outlaw makes a dash for a barn on the side of the road in order to hide. 'There he is!' I yell at the cops as I give chase so as to not lose sight of the fugitive. I enter the barn and glimpse him escaping through a gap in the next splintered wall. Rushing to the gap, I break loose planks of wood in order to widen it and become astonished at the rustic vista beyond as I practically stand on the edge of a gully. 'Where did he go?' I look down and see a river shimmering in the sunlight. 'Am I dreaming?'

PHASE STATE

I plunge into the river from a great height without any regard for safety as I know I'm dreaming. The water feels just right. When I resurface and begin to swim along the steep riverbank, I notice that the scenery has turned into a vibrant, picturesque village. The riverbank is now a row of buildings and I leap out of the water to grip the plastic sill of a third-floor window, climbing upwards and turning my head to behold the rest of my surroundings and knowing that I am supposed to do something for Project Elijah. That's it! This is my opportunity to encounter my deceased mother-in-law Sandra and communicate with her for 'The Relative Experiment'. I glide away from the windowsill as I make out a building that stands out from the rest: it's an impressive black silo, clearly cylindrical and wide enough to remind me of a giant bin, but majestically adorned with gold-plated lines and a cross. The entrance is guarded by the figure of a black man wearing a cassock and I immediately take the structure to be a church.

'That's where I'll find Sandra! She's inside the church!' I go over the priest's head and fly all the way to the top of the silo, revealing it to be open and offering me direct access to its interior. I gradually descend to find myself landing between rows of pews and an altar, next to which is an open coffin. I hear the unmistakable coughing of my mother-in-law and witness her figure sit up from the ebony casket. Despite her strikingly realistic form, I am not scared even if a part of me emotionally entertains the possibility that I might be in the presence of Sandra's spirit. In fact, I want it to be her, but I also want to know exactly what I'm dealing with here. She looks and sounds so real! Her trim silver hair, her facial features and her familiar voice are on the money! She is well groomed, sporting a silky blue shirt and her frame is strong and healthy—contrasting her gaunt appearance in her final days. She seems distressed as she coughs and appears to be clearing her throat. When she is done, she looks up and bursts into tears before we have an emotional cuddle and sit next to each other by the altar to engage in the following conversation containing the questions I had planned beforehand ...

Sandra: 'What took you so long?'
Me: 'I'm here! How can I make Stacey happier?'
Sandra: 'Look after my girl!'
Me: 'I will, no worries. So ... What is your afterlife like?'
Sandra: (Cheerfully) 'Oooh, I've been to the moon! I've been to marvelous places! I can go anywhere! I've got mushrooms ...'
Me: (excitedly thinking of magic mushrooms and that Sandra might show me what she experienced via psychedelics) 'What? Let's take them!'
Sandra: 'Come, come!'

She gets up and takes my hand, leading me towards a doorway revealing another room with a few people gathering around a banquet characterised by a lot of fruit. Before I can enter the room with Sandra, I wake up unexpectedly.

WAKING STATE

I dash off key observations about my lucid dream and reflect on the experience. It is not the first time I meet Sandra, or deceased loved ones for that matter, in the phase state, but it is always an intense and emotional experience. Seeing and talking to them fills me with joy and I always act as though it is really them. Deep down, I want such figures to really be them and not mere products of my mind.

In hindsight, Sandra answered my first question regarding my wife as I imagine she would. Undoubtedly, my mother-in-law would want me to look after her daughter in her absence from the realm of the living. To the second question, Sandra replied in a manner giving a strong impression that I was really engaged in a dialogue with myself. I didn't realise it at the time, but, retrospectively, the fact that my mother-in-law said she had been to the moon coincides with my original plan to meet her, which was, 'Fly to the moon and find Sandra there.' And affirming her ability to go to marvelous places and anywhere she wants parallels my attitude to lucid dreaming and its possibilities.

The very first thing Sandra said to me in this experience, which was ask what took me so long to meet her, can tellingly reflect my internal dialogue after finally manifesting the conditions in which to execute this experiment. The mention of 'mushrooms'—which I instantly took to be the fungal growths containing psilocybin—in the reply to the afterlife question also seems out of character for the real Sandra and more pertinent to my own experience with psychedelics in my twenties. I often imagine deathbed visions to be akin to psychedelic trips brought about by the release of endorphins!

Nevertheless, there is a desire to believe that such experiences are encounters with the spirits of loved ones who passed away. Deep down, with all the emotions that this experience brought forth, I reluctantly refuse to dismiss, altogether, a scenario where I have communed with the real Sandra—who had access to personal memories of experimenting with magic mushrooms and used it to convey to me what her afterlife has been like—however improbable it is.

I'm new to this forum and this is the first story I've read, it blew me away! Such an exciting experience.

Sorry to ask basic questions but what is 'the phase'? Also, do you have that much control over lucidity that you can go to bed with the intention of inducing lucidity?

Hi, sotondoc!

I come from Michael Raduga's School of Out-of-body Travel and the phase or phase state is an umbrella term we use to indicate waking consciousness during sleep at around 40 Hz of brainwave activity—which is where autoscopy (out-of-body sensations) and lucid dreaming take place. In my dream journal, the term simply indicates that I am lucid. I authored an article years ago on Rebecca Turner's website and included the following definitions:

Waking State: Also known as wakefulness. In this state, people perceive the physical realm. An individual who is awake is conscious, self-aware, and there is realism of perception. The environment is stable and there is no required effort to enter this state. The perceived world follows set rules, and, only on a quantum level, do things appear to be more uncertain.

Dream State: This entails non-lucid dreams and falling asleep is all that is needed to enter this state. Self-awareness is absent and the unconscious mind rules when a person dreams. The dreamer is mindlessly immersed in plots and often detached from waking life memories. The experience can be vivid or vague, and, despite the instability, the illogical appears to make sense. Certain techniques can be employed to boost dream recall.

Phase State: This entails out-of-body experiences (OOBEs or OBEs), and both wake-initiated and dream-initiated lucid dreams (WILDs and DILDs). They are all part of the same phenomenon as the phase state practitioner has the distinct sensation of being apart from the physical body. This elusive state can be entered before, during, and after sleep. Effort is required to enter the phase voluntarily, although, some experiences are induced involuntarily. The phaser is conscious and self-aware in what appears to be a phantom reality of a mental nature which often emulates the waking state. The phase can surpass waking experience in quality, and, although environments can appear stable, they can also transmute. It is possible to slip into the dream state from here and vice versa.

It also includes methods to 'enter the phase':
https://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming....ase-state.html

When I was younger, even before I seriously started my practice, I used to reach the lucid dream state very easily. Now I manage to induce lucid dreams around 5 times a month (on a good month). The best thing to do is to have a relaxed approach and nail the concept of 'mind awake, body asleep' to achieve the required balance. If I fall asleep trying to induce a WILD, for instance, I tend to realise that I'm dreaming afterwards; in other words, if I don't get a WILD, I get a DILD. The DEILD method can be one of the easiest ways if you familiarise yourself with the sensations of waking up from a dream.

This website has some great methods and techniques:
www.obe4u.com

Date: 20/11/2021
Bedtime: 1.30am
Awakening: 8.45am
Return to bed: 9am
Method of entry: deferred direct
Awakening: 10.30am
Attempt: successful
Phase experience: The Mona Lisa Experiment
Duration: 50 seconds

WAKING STATE

I wake up to feed my mum's Yorkshire terriers and leave them to play in the back garden before returning to bed to try the direct method of entering the phase state. Because I feel tired, it is easy to relax on my back—which is not my usual position to fall asleep in but ideal for reaching hypnagogia under the circumstances. Before long, a series of fleeting images manifests until a perceived lapse of consciousness.

PHASE STATE

I become aware of standing in a living-room replica, realistically surrounded by Christmas decorations, and remember to look for the Mona Lisa portrait for Project Elijah. I go through the back door like a ghost in order to access the garden where I believe Mona Lisa is to be found. What I find, instead, is what appears to be a basketball court with some characters milling about and no Leonardo da Vinci painting in sight; however, the surroundings brick walls display colourful graffiti. I focus on a particular wall replete with complex art and fail to detect anything that resembles a portrait—and even after looking away and back at the surface to summon the Renaissance picture, hardly anything changes. I carefully move along the wall in order to examine it carefully and come to a central square about the size of an A2 canvas containing geometric shapes; as I tilt my head, I begin to make pictorial sense of it—the image depicts a vehicle headed downhill and appears to be partially cropped by a shrugging cartoon character that can be best described as a clueless bald man pouting.

I return to the house expecting Mona Lisa to be present in the living room but I encounter an altered interior dominated by more graffiti. I ascend from the floor and pass through the white ceiling with plans to access an imagined upper level containing da Vinci's masterpiece but find myself floating in darkness instead. Due to a cold, I begin to hear my laboured breathing and snoring in my sleep, which immediately strikes me as paradoxical because I am awake and hovering in a dark, phantom space. I'm losing depth of perception so I start rubbing my hands and notice the sound it produces getting louder. I also slowly spin in the void in order to create a vestibular sense and preclude sensations of lying in bed. A vertical column of white light emerges a few feet away and appears to moderately define a sombre bedroom environment in which I perceive myself to be facing partially drawn curtains.

An edgy man in black resembling the actor Dennis Haysbert (who plays the troubled President David Palmer in the TV series 24) is restlessly pacing up and down next to the bed and mumbling incoherently. My judgement is askew here: even though I take the man in black to be a hallucination, I believe I can get a head start in recording my sleep experiences by rushing to my bedside cabinet to get a pen and a piece of paper. As I sit on the bed, and before I can open the drawer, the neurotic man in black approaches and sighs exasperatedly. Surmising this figure to be a frustrated aspect of myself, I hold his hand and invite him to take a seat and relax. 'I can help you!' I say as I take both of his hands. The man squats down in front of me and sardonically replies, 'Really?!' I get the impression that he has no faith in me when he gives me a wry smile. Suddenly, he grips my hands and his countenance takes a devious turn; dreadful, malevolent eyes leer at me—his physiognomy now similar to Tony Todd's when he played the demonic Candyman back in the '90s.

As I try to break free from the grapple, he cocks his head to the side to reveal an extra almond eye on his cheekbone. I assess the situation in Jungian terms and regard the aggressor as possibly representing a shadowy aspect of myself which I have perhaps been denying on some unconscious level and now an opportunity presents itself to potentially address my dark side, as it were. This view, however, doesn't allay my fear in the slightest and wrestling with this figure is proving too much to handle. 'You need to be gone!' I shout as I shake the shadowy monster off me, making it magically vanish in an engulfing dark background. Now I feel a presence behind me and an arm wraps itself around my torso. I want to believe that I'm perceiving my wife cuddling me in the real world as I am still shaken by the unpleasant encounter with the man in black. I briefly wake up and my sleeping wife has her arm around me as suspected and wished for. I can hear the dogs barking in the back garden, making me a little annoyed with the noise they are making in the neighborhood. I'm tired and fall asleep.

DREAM STATE

I am at a crowded Canning Town train station in East London. As I walk around, the surroundings morph into a Tate Modern gallery displaying exquisite metal sculptures and Bauhaus images in mostly black, white and blue (a lot less colourful than the graffiti art I'd seen earlier). There is a frustration in me as I'm not quite sure what I am looking for but I know it is not what I see. I exit what appears to now be Twickenham Stadium and my wife and children—who are a lot younger and smaller than they ought to be—happen to be with me. Suddenly, a heavyset Asian man appears to have been kicked out of the stadium and does not look happy. In his irascible state, he cursed at a group of men in high vis vests and I move the kids to safety. A rottweiler, chained to a bollard, constantly barks and snaps at the enraged man who threatens to punch the animal. A couple of bystanders restrain him before he has a chance to hurt the dog but subsequently let him go when he appears to calm down. A crowd carefully observes him and he begins to feel like a potential terrorist. He picks a fight with the group of workers and the police turns up. I wake up to the sound of barking.

WAKING STATE

I reflect on my experiences and jot them down, noting that I could not find Mona Lisa in the phase state. In hindsight, the subsequent dream state reveals cues—such as absurd environmental changes and my kids being the wrong age—which I failed to recognise in order to promote consciousness of the true nature of its events. I do suspect the terrorist in the dream reflected my anger at the barking in the real world, which needs to be recognised and kept in check. Time to see to the dogs.

Date: 14/12/2021
Bedtime: 8pm
Awakening: 12.10am
Return to bed: 3.15am
Method of entry: dream consciousness
Awakening: 7.05am
Attempt: successful
Phase experience: The Pinch Experiment
Duration: 45 seconds

DREAM STATE

I'm enjoying dancing with strangers at a party in a strange house. Adjacent to the dance floor, there is a kitchen where something is cooking and a staircase. Me and my wife explore upstairs and are delighted to meet a prominent figure in the world of political activism. 'It's John Foucault!' I say to my wife, not realising that in waking life the name is Michel Foucault, who died decades ago and was not a slender black man constantly surrounded by acolytes. Suddenly, a rabble of angry Foucault opponents break into the property and the flight of stairs between us and the incoming threat is barricaded. Just as I think there is no way out, we are ushered to an open window and manage to escape danger. I am now walking by myself through Crane Park and find this continuity incongruous with the events that preceded it. The trees and herbage enfold the footpath in a peculiar way and the stream characteristic of Crane Park is nowhere to be found. I recognise that I am dreaming.

PHASE STATE

The environment is not necessarily more colourful upon my lucid realisation, but the landscape is certainly highly defined under a bright blue sky and the ground increases in realism when I scoop up rocks and sand with my hands. (Realism: 100%) Almost immediately, I recall the pinch experiment and look for my wife who had been with me prior to my lucidity. Gliding through the dirt track towards where the party house from the precedent dream might be found, I bring tactility and sound to life by churning up the soil with my hands. It feels like I'm on an invisible skateboard, playfully scarring the dirt track as I go, until I realise there are no houses ahead, so I decide to slow down and check behind a bush for my wife. 'Stacey?' She remains absent and all I see is twigs and leaves. Back on the dirt track, gliding through it at appreciable speed in the opposite direction and causing stones to collide and spark as a result, I see a perpendicular road ahead and take a right at the end of the park.

I access the nearest house, expecting to find wife there. Approaching the cottage-like structure, I see that its front door is already wide open and run into it; inside, I find myself in a waking-life bathroom replica, where Stacey's doppelgänger is perched on the sink. 'Alright, babe?' she says. 'Let me see your shoulder!' I reply, wasting no time as I roll up her short sleeve. I pinch my pseudo-wife as hard as I can on the right shoulder and, even though she remains indifferent, I worry that somehow I might be hurting my wife in the real world. 'It's okay,' the doppelgänger says, 'It doesn't hurt.' I make sure the pinch is strong enough that it would surely bruise someone if it were performed in waking life, simultaneously hoping that I won't find a bruised wife upon awakening. My curiosity about what is happening in the real world probably causes me to foul. I wake up.

WAKING STATE

I record the experience and check my wife's shoulder, explaining to her what the Project Elijah task entailed. She reveals that she is not bruised, confirming that actions in the phase state cannot have a direct effect on the external world. I suddenly remember, however, that Stacey has a booked appointment for a Covid-19 booster later. When I ask her which arm she prefers to have the vaccine injected in, she coincidentally says the right one.

Date: 18/02/2022
Bedtime: 3am
Awakening: 10.40am
Return to bed: 10.50am
Method of entry: dream consciousness
Attempt: successful
Awakening: 12pm
DILD: The Amputation Experiment

DREAMING:

I'm roaming over a beach with a group of lucid dreaming enthusiasts and cross over to an adjacent train station platform, making for a weird landscape juxtaposition where the sea abruptly ends and a railway begins. Both contrasting sceneries are deemed to be 'lucid dreaming workshops' to be used for practice. The platform is sealed by ultramarine blinds on both ends which are lifted by porters whenever someone wants to enter or leave the premises. A couple of trains zoom past the station and beyond the sealed platform I am suddenly in a wheelchair, moving through a park with children running around and alongside a row of houses with dark alleys. A particular alley has a deep but narrow gap in the ground—a potential deathtrap reminding of the series '911' because of the danger scenarios depicted on the show.

WAKING:

I use record the dreaming experience and use the loo. I return to bed just before eleven o'clock in the morning and attempt to enter the phase directly but end up falling asleep next to my sleeping wife.

DREAMING:

I'm dining at a restaurant with my mother and she steps outside to smoke a cigarette (she doesn't smoke in real life). Eventually I say goodbye to her as I spot my eldest son and wife looking for me a few tables away and they exit the restaurant prematurely so I rush after them so we can all go home together. Now I'm an observer (rather than a participant) and a short man is facing me like I'm a camera and talking about how most people get freaked out by oversized hands. He attempts to shake hands with random members of the public like he is the star of a prank show. Most people avoid the little man's disproportionately big hands but an old man grips his wrist and points out that his fingers have skin-coloured extensions attached to them, revealing the hands to be a lot smaller.

As a participant, I'm trying to avoid an acquaintance who keeps following me in a strange town. I go through an alley and squeeze into an aperture of a building in need of repairs in order to lose the individual on my trail. I keep running straight until I exit the building from the other side and now I'm flying, finding myself gliding through a beautiful garden. 'I'm dreaming!'

LUCID DREAMING:

I glide through a garden path with brightly coloured, conifer leaves on either side, displaying unusually vivid orange and yellow hues. As I move through the garden I hit the narrow foliage with my hands and hear the realistic sound of clashing. There is no green in sight but I feel like I'm in the most beautiful autumn scenario as the warm colours of the plants and trees around me are exquisitely vibrant. The garden, under a clear blue sky, feels like a labyrinth. As I try to contain my excitement and think of a plan of action on the spot without hesitation, I remember Project Elijah's task. I see a gap in warm-coloured shrubbery with crimson tinges and go through it (hoping to find a blade), coming upon a vast playground with slides, swings, see-saws, spring riders and jungle gyms. A few feet away rests a wooden merry-go-round with a few tools on it.

The first tool I pick up is a pair of pliers which is discarded in favour of what resembles a small tenon saw with a bizarre blade that appears to be sharp enough for the job. With this strange tool I sever my right index finger with in one fell swoop. There is no pain, no feeling of any kind, and no blood. I look at my hand and see a stub of a finger with an edge that seems to have healed instantly; I can also move all my digits including the stub. Then, I look at the surface of the merry-go-round to see the rest of my index twitching slightly until it stops dead. I try to remotely move it on the wooden surface but I can't even feel it let alone control it. The severed half of my finger that is now completely separate from me won't even move telekinetically. It is nothing but a dead piece of meat that no longer belongs to me.

As I move away from the merry-go-round to explore the environment, I feel a jolt and wake up as my sleeping wife bumps into me.
Duration: 25 seconds

WAKING:

I jot down my dream recall and reflect on my fabulously unreal experience at the oneiric playground. I had absolutely no idea what would happen before the test and no expectations as far as I can tell. Next time I plan to induce a lucid dream, I must return to a separate bed so as to not be disturbed and that way I will have time to execute other steps in my plan of action.

Date: 25/03/2022
Bedtime: 4am
Awakening: 7am
Return to bed: 7.30am
Method of entry: dream consciousness
Attempt: successful
Awakening: 12pm
Phase experience: The Full Stomach Experiment

DREAM STATE

Taking Daisy (my former neighbour's daughter) to school. We are both on bicycles but suddenly I am on a skateboard without wheels and struggle to keep up with her in a playground full of grassy knolls, sand dunes and rough terrain in general. I pick up the skateboard and run after the girl, fearing I might lose her as she goes into a train station and down a flight of stairs leading to a platform on foot (her bicycle disappears). A tanned commuter is coming down the steps right behind me and speaks to me but I can't remember what was said. Daisy finally halts and speaks to the stranger briefly as though he's familiar.

Me, my wife, our kids and my mother get inside a black vintage Citroen and ride to the city for sightseeing and perhaps do some shopping. My mum is driving (she doesn't own this type of car in real life) and turns on the radio, causing Limp Bizkit's song 'Rollin' (Air Raid Vehicle)' to blast from the speakers. We all start singing along to the chorus and swaying to the rap-rock beat, but I soon find myself unable to sing properly as my voice becomes muffled.

Me and my wife take turns in playing a virtual reality game where we have to control a space probe and make it crash on a particular planet of our choice. I'm trying to avoid the red planet Mars and then aim for Jupiter in a bid to make the spacecraft enter its Great Red Spot. I enter the Jovian atmosphere by heading for the stormy bullseye which grows in size to become a gigantic, warm-coloured cyclone. The centre of the storm is like a peaceful vortex and soon it is just me descending into the cloudy funnel like a solitary astronaut. The deeper I go, the less realistic the atmospheric surroundings become and the more I feel like I'm traveling through a simulated tunnel, the end of which is dark and the swirling patterns leading to it increasingly display white tendrils and blue wisps among the dominant fiery colours. Soon, my hands touch the whirling clouds, leading to my death in the game and suddenly I'm no longer a participant as I find myself looking at a screaming avatar on a screen, perishing in Jupiter's storm with a red caption that reads 'Game Over' and I laugh it off with my wife.

WAKING STATE

I wake up to the sound of my alarm and make sure the kids get up for school. I feel quite tired after experiencing a bout of insomnia and return to bed having used the loo with no intention to enter the phase state. I fall asleep almost immediately.

DREAM STATE

Me and my family decorate and change the layout of the living room, which looks different. There is a lot going on: walls being painted, furniture being moved and oddly, cement being applied to the floor. My wife, my mother and my oldest sister (estranged in waking life) block me into a corner of the room with a sofa and decide to go shopping. I can't move but I am busy doing something where I am. My youngest son Alfie is about to enter the room and I tell him to stop as it is a hazardous environment. He reaches for the light switch and I start panicking, thinking he might get an electric shock. Then, I notice the switch has been cemented over but don't find it odd—instead I tell my son, 'Alfie, you can't turn the light on because mum's gone over the switch with cement!' He teases me about threatening to touch it with his finger and I get slightly annoyed.

Scene shift: Me, my wife, my mum, my sister and someone else are walking together outdoors on a pavement when I notice a social contradiction—me and my estranged sister haven't spoken in years and yet she is walking next to me! Am I dreaming? I check my right arm tattoo to find the simplistic picture of a woman resembling the Virgin Mary instead of a dagger going through a skull with a ribbon displaying my wife and kids' names spiralling around them as is the case in real life. I rub the erroneous tattoo with one finger to see if I can smudge it and find that it looks surprisingly permanent, but at this point I already have enough evidence to convince me that the world around me is an illusion. 'I'm definitely dreaming!'

PHASE STATE

I look at my oneiric, make-believe family members and none of them look right. Their faces are strange and somewhat vacant. The fourth person is a complete stranger and all of them stand before me like slightly animated mannequins. I laugh and tell them they look fake. To the one resembling my sister I say: 'What the hell are you doing here?' and to the strange bald and chubby Latino man, 'And who the hell are you?' I deliberately pick a fight with the random with the intent to practise martial arts. We fight over and around stationary vehicles and he's giving me the right resistance: good at sparring and blocking! Feeling satisfied with the training, I fly away and pass through the wall of a house nearby to encounter an interior similar to my living room in the real world. As I explore the environment, it takes me a few seconds to recall my plan of action, and I remember the experiment of 'eating to feel full' as I go through the ceiling, which feels treacly around my torso. Half way up the loft, I think of ceiling as edible and find that the wooden floor near my mouth tastes like crispy, condensed candyfloss. I continue to pull myself upwards as I chew part of the floor above the ceiling.

I find a metal tube akin to an elongated thermos flask on the floor of the loft and start pulling proper pink candyfloss out of it, immediately stuffing my face with the woolly edible. I spot a bed in the middle of the loft and sit on it, continuing to eat lots of candyfloss from the long, metallic flask—amounts that I would not be able to cope with in waking life. At this point, I treat the source of the fluffy, sugary substance as capable of providing limitlessly—a magical bottomless pit! I jump to the middle of the bed to crouch as I swallow as much candyfloss as I can in fast succession. My knees come to rest on the mattress as I gobble up what's on my left hand whist pulling more candyfloss out of the flask with my right hand. As I stuff my face, I notice two freestanding, full-length mirrors—one in front of me about three feet away from the bed, and the other to my left; but none of them display my reflection initially, they only appear to convincingly reflect the loft environment without my presence.

I wish to see myself eating, so I look at the flask for a moment then back at mirrors—according to the frontal and profile reflections, I am a huge, bald, chubby and cute baby greedily eating a lot of candyfloss. My reflections' movements match my own, giving me the impression that I have really turned into an oversized baby. The profile reflection begins to reveal blonde tufts of hair on an enlarged head. I gaze at the frontal reflection as I continue to munch and, as I savour the fluffy sugar, I tell the baby I see: 'You look ridiculous!' I start wondering what the reflection would look like if it got mad at me. The baby inside the mirror continues to mimic my movements but morphs into a frowning Gollum-like creature, gradually becoming slender and his tufts of hair grow longer and darker. I've been chomping on limitless candyfloss since I arrived in this loft and I still don't feel full. I would be feeling sick by now if I had consumed this much candyfloss in the real world! Try as I might, I cannot reach that feeling of being stuffed. It's not normal.

WAKING STATE

I wake up on an empty stomach and don't feel full in the real world either. I feel no different. I jot down my sleep experiences and go about my day.