Thread: Task of the Month for September 2015

It looks like my wings from last month somehow escaped being shorn! Since I'm here today to report a failure, I need to be de-winged.

Last night I had an unintentional but really long LD in which I tried three times to completed this month's Advanced Task i, entirely without success. That's what I get for switching my focus in the last few months from dreaming to physical activity... but I needed to get back into shape!

Full dream here: Drawing a Sword/Ozymandias (DILD)

I didn't even realize until I wrote up the account and titled it that "drawing a sword" is actually a pun!! So it should have been successful! Alas...

Here are the highlights related to my dismal failure at completing the TOTM:

Spoiler for (Not!) Drawing a Sword:

I had originally planned to draw a dinosaur and bring it to life for the TOTM, but now I decided to start with something easier. I had been at my HEMA class yesterday, so I decided to draw a sword, then manifest it and do some practice. My initial strategy was to simply draw the sword in my left palm, so that I could manifest it directly in my hand (I am right-handed, so I was using my right hand to draw with). However, the lines changed as soon as I had set them down, turning into a cartoon-like character. I figured fine, I can work with that, it doesn't matter what I manifest... but my intention to transform the drawing into a real being fizzled. Nothing happened except that the drawing changed into a different character, and then faded.

Changing strategy, as I found myself walking next to a building I drew a sword right on the wall. It was a poor drawing, chunky and ill-proportioned, but I figured I could fix it in post-production. I put my hand over where the hilt was drawn, intending to grab the sword as it manifested. Nothing happened. I wondered if it would help to reach into the wall, in case the sword was inside it. I pressed my right hand against the wall, which consisted of a reddish, textured stucco. It resisted at first, but I kept pressing, and eventually it yielded like a crumbly semi-moist clay, and my hand went right through. I closed my hand over an object and pulled it out. Unfortunately it was not the sword I was trying to create, but a comic book.

It occurred to me that I was always trying to make the dream state conform to my will, and I should pay more attention to the things that it offered me unexpectedly, so I took a moment to flip through the comic book as I walked on past the building. The hero of the comic was a young boy, but nothing caught my interest, so I tossed it on the ground. Lucidity got a little weak, and I found myself grilling a piece of chicken for my husband's dinner. The image of the piece of meat on the grill was, in retrospect, an obvious bit of day residue from a Facebook post I had seen last night.

While getting the dinner ready I found myself indoors, where I made a third try at drawing the sword, inscribing an outline on the wall again. Since there was a DC in the room with me, I thought I would be clever and asked him to grab the sword off the wall and give it to me. I figured it would still count for the TOTM as long as the drawing transformed into a three-dimensional object by any means. But he couldn't do it either!

Later I got fed up and just manifested a sword directly into my hand so that I could actually get some practice in. For some reason I found it easy to create a sword in my hand out of nothing, even though I had been unable to do it from the drawings! I went through a few rounds of the "flow" movements I had learned in my HEMA class, but found myself wondering why I was wasting precious dream time practicing something that I could work on just as well in waking life, so I flew off to further explore the dream.