Verre

Ritual: I had time to sleep in this morning so I was motivated to get lucid. Went to bed at midnight and woke at 6am to feed the cat. Didn't do a full WBTB, but took a few supplements (alpha-g, choline, l-theanine) plus a tiny amount (between 1-2mg) of very old galantamine. I lay down on my back to delay sleep onset and practiced progressive relaxation, a few SSILD cycles, and counting. Couldn't count very high (usually not past six, my focus is terrible these days) but clearly noticed onset of hypnogogic imagery and managed to put in a number of rotations before falling into dreamless sleep. When I awoke after a few minutes (guaranteed if I fall asleep on my back), I turned on my right side and let myself fall asleep normally, feeling adequately primed and hoping for the best. This "kitchen sink" approach has pretty much become my standard and despite being really haphazard has a decent success rate, often resulting in WILDs. This time I had an NLD or two that I don't remember well, then the following semi-lucid that turned into a DILD.

SLD: I am on a beach. All is not well: there are what look like tiny floating islands approaching from across the sea, and on each one stands a little stone tower and a menacing-looking figure in black armor with a horned helmet. The armored figures to be using the islands as transportation. Though not quite lucid, I remember that I have certain broad powers in this place, so I walk along the beach until I spot a couple empty islands, and try to summon one toward me. It turns into a little white sailboat and promptly sinks. I try to summon the second one, and the same thing happens. So much for island hopping. I turn right and continue to walk along the waterfront.

Something seems oddly familiar about this place—I've been here before, haven't I? I note the urban architecture up ahead, the sprawl of a city just past the beach and I'm distinctly reminded of a particular dream I had once, years ago now. It was here, I am sure of it, though this corresponds to no earthly place. I don't remember much about that earlier dream, except that it started in one of the apartment buildings a few blocks from the beach and then I went down to the parking lot, but saw the beach in the distance. [I think I actually found it, an entry from 12/29/13, but I misremembered the order of events: I was in the parking lot initially, then dropped by the beach before going up to the apartment.]

Various people are wandering around the beach, and a distinctive figure approaches. He is a thin old man with stringy, longish grey hair, carrying three lidded boxes in different colors, each about eighteen inches square. "What do they call this bay?" I ask him. "Sigismund?" he suggests, then modifies it. "Or Sigisroot?" He seems uncertain. I am about to ask the name of the city, but we are interrupted by the approach of a huge wave. We try to scramble up the beach but don't make it in time, and the wave crashes over us. I have to struggle against the pull of its wake, meanwhile trying to reach around to find the old man, to help him if possible. I grab someone's hand in the water, but it turns out to be a short, dark-haired woman. After helping her to shore, I come across the old man again on the beach. He has made it to safety, but lost two of his boxes. I feel partly responsible for the loss of his boxes, so I go back to the water to look for them. I locate the boxes but their contents have spilled. Apparently they contained cassette tapes, so I dredge as many as possible out of the water and wet sand, restoring them to one of the boxes. After I've grabbed as many as I can find, I return the boxes to the old man.

FA-DILD: The dream resets, perhaps a half-waking, and I am in my house again. I start reviewing what just happened, and write down the name of the bay, both variations—not sure I realized at the time I was writing in a dream notebook. As I think over the events of the dream, I realize I must have been semi-lucid at the point where I was trying to summon the islands and then recognized the setting from prior dream. I reason that if I was semi-lucid then, I must be actually lucid now. Dream logic is terrible, but this time it did the trick—thinking about lucidity made me recognize that I was still dreaming. Since I was back in my house, I decided to do the TOTM of walking through the wall. I had interpreted "my room" to mean the bedroom, so I head in there and immediately turn left to look at the wall. I'm pleased and surprised to find an ample stretch of wall between the door and bookcase (surprised because in WL there is no free wall space in the room at all, to the point where I thought I would have to do the task by going into the closet!) Instead, the dream has obligingly provided sufficient room for me to stand in front of the wall, so I press both hands flat against it and concentrate. The wall resists the pressure at first, so I increase it, then watch as my right hand starts to sink into the surface. The wall crumbles under my hand like weak plaster with an impressively realistic texture and sensation. As I continue to push, a whole section about two feet wide dislodges and falls inward under my right hand, and then I push my whole body forward and break through the rest.

I find myself in a cramped, closet like space, empty yet messy somehow, like it was poorly constructed—for instance, there are exposed 2x4s at odd diagonals. There is no visible way out, and I remember back to a time I was exploring the use of mirrors as portals and got stuck in a labyrinth of empty rooms that became ever smaller and more claustrophobic. [The dream I was thinking of occurred on 4/17/14, and the earliest experience of this kind I recorded on 12/18/10]. Simply recognizing the dream's tricks gives me the confidence not to be waylaid by them again, so I turn left and push through that wall too. Unsurprisingly, I am in an even smaller, darker, and more cramped space. I remind myself to remain optimistic and keep pushing forward with the expectation of getting out. I push through a couple more dark, tiny, empty spaces and then find myself in one that is different. It feels like an actual closet, with coats. What catches my eye is the style of those coats: they remind me of the cheap winter coats we wore in the 1970s, made of smooth synthetic cloth in drab colors and augmented with wide fake-fleece collars. I push through the coats and finally tumble free into an outdoor space.

It's one of those transitions that are so striking in dream. I had been struggling in narrow claustrophobic space with poor visibility, and suddenly everything has changed: I'm in open space, the air is clear and fresh, the light is bright, colors are vivid, my vision is sharp, and I feel a surge of ebullience. I remind myself that it is worth it, all the trouble I go to over dreaming, even if dream isn't always cooperative, because of experiences like this. I even notice that little flutter in my solar plexus that I associate with deep dream.

I move forward, on my hands and knees at first. I am at the base of a steep hill, and there are a number of animals sitting on the hillside, placidly watching me, including several ape-like creatures. As I crawl through the grass, I note the distinct texture of it: it might not be grass at all, actually, but some kind of ground cover with stiff, spiny stalks that flatten rather than bend under my hands. When I get to my feet, I see that a number of these stalks have actually adhered to my palms. They look like black tubes about three inches long and only a couple millimeters across, hollow, with a longer thin hair sticking another inch out the end. I try to pluck one out and it won't come off. I have the impression that even if I manage to pull off the outer tube, the hair will be left behind. It occurs to me to wonder if this explains the ape-like creatures, which seem unusually intelligent and anthropomorphic: did other people come here before me, and end up with so many of these hairs attached to their skin that they became furry?

I consider flying, but decide not to: I'm really interested in this place, and flying would destabilize me from this particular scenario, if not the dream itself. So I continue walking forward on foot, reminding myself both literally and figuratively to stay grounded. As I reach the end of the flat terrain at the bottom of the steep hill, I look up at the animals arrayed on the upper terraces, who are still quietly watching me. What should I ask them? I never seem to get anywhere asking the names of things, so I decide to be clever, and call up to them: "What would be a really interesting question for a newcomer to ask?" No answer. I repeat myself, but still no reply, so I start climbing up toward them.

When I reach the upper terrace, things get complex. I can't remember what passes between me and one of the creatures, who is more man-like now, before he pulls a knife on me—though it is unclear if he he is using the knife to threaten me or the grizzled, older-looking apeman creature who is sitting to his left. I wrest the knife from his grasp, which knocks him off balance. He nearly falls off the cliff (which suddenly seems a lot steeper now, almost vertical, than when I climbed up it a moment before) and grabs on to my waist to save himself. I check my moral compass and find that I feel no compulsion to save him—something about his attitude puts me off—so I peel his arms away and he falls to the base of the cliff, presumably to his death. The elder creature has retrieved the knife, which is now lying at his feet, and I go over to look at it.

When I pick up the knife, I find it to be a wide, cleaver-like implement made of thin cardboard with silver foil stuck to it. There is writing on the cardboard side, and I read through a whole confession, apparently by the creature I just sent to his death. The text describes an elaborate scheme that involved getting me pregnant and then killing me after the child was born, because it concludes, "I won't regret killing you when I see your features in the face of our infant." I find this repulsive and it resolves my lingering doubts about whether letting him fall was the right thing to do. I ask the elder creature if I can keep the knife, and he doesn't speak, but I take his silence as assent. I notice that there is a second knife on the ground, made of roughly-forged steel or iron and elegantly curved like a viking blade (the handle a loop of the same metal), that resembles like the one I wrested away initially, so I swap out the mock-up I'm holding for the real blade, and walk forward on the hilltop.

I encounter another man, this one entirely human in appearance except for a strange feature: his face is completely wrapped in grimy white bandages, leaving only a bit of forehead and his hair explosed. The bandages are thicker over his left eye, but seem to adhere closely to his right—I can see the shape of the eye bulging under them—so I conclude that must be the one he somehow sees out of. Despite his odd appearance I feel an immediate affinity for him, in contrast to the last guy. He leads me into a building, where a girl approaches us and asks me, "Who made that knife?" I look at the blade in my hand. It doesn't bear a long text like the mock-up, but there is a row of runes along the top edge that I can't read. "He's dead now," I reply laconically.

In the entryway of the building, we immediately go through a door to the right, into what looks like a machine shop. The machines are in the center of the room, and two people are operating them, but I can't tell what they're making. The machines have some kind of spinning disk that either cuts or polishes. The bandaged guy is telling me about a hardware store somewhere. "That's where the first ship came from." I have the impression he is talking about a spaceship, and gather that there is a whole complicated plot behind all of this, but I don't know the details. By the time we finish walking through the room, I am waking up.

Ritual: Last night I experimented for the first time with kava kava root (Piper methysticum). I had read many anecdotal reports that it instigated vivid dreams and perhaps even lucidity, so I thought it was worth trying out. I ordered some dried powdered root from an online herb and spice supplier that I trust. I don't have any doubts about the freshness and quality, as the package confirms that it was packed earlier this month and sourced from Vanuatu. I had read many reports of people complaining about the taste, describing it as "muddy," so I was surprised when I opened the package and encountered the most extraordinary and delightful fragrance. The plant is related to pepper, so it made sense that the scent would be peppery, but there was also something delicately floral about it and even a hint of wintergreen.

I had abstained from alcohol all day, since the two should not be consumed together, and my plan was to drink the kava before bed. I had a late dinner, ending at 11pm, so my plan was to give myself two hours to digest, then start drinking the kava at 1am and go to bed a few hours afterward (unless it made me too sleepy before that, which seemed like a distinct possibility). I don't like cold drinks late at night, but I read that you could warm kava gently without destroying its properties, so I adapted a recipe for "Mexican Hot Cocokavachocolate," blending two tablespoons of powdered kava kava (half what the recipe calls for, as I didn't want to overdo it my first time), two tablespoons of cocoa powder, agave syrup, a spoonful of cinnamon, and a generous pinch of cayenne with about two cups of almond milk (I skipped the vanilla extract suggested by the recipe because I didn't want to use even a tiny amount of alcohol). I blended this until it was frothy and then separated it into two mugs, putting one in the fridge—I planned to start with a minimal dose, and work up from there if it felt warranted. The other mug I heated briefly in the microwave, just enough to warm it, and then topped it with a dusting of grated Himalayan salt and freshly made whipped cream.

Okay, I'll admit I have a slightly weird palate (for instance, I *love* the taste of wormwood), but this was one of the most delicious dessert drinks I have ever tried in my life! It was so much better than regular hot chocolate; the spices and kava gave it exceptional depth of flavor and an unusual aftertaste. I didn't even need to strain it: I don't know if my powder was ground unusually finely or if the almond milk held it in suspension better than plain water, but it only added body, not grit, to the concoction.

I'm glad that I had done enough research to anticipate the curiously numbing, analgesic sensation that spread from my mouth all the down my esophagus, because that's the kind of thing that would really worry you if you didn't know it was supposed to happen! I sipped the kava very slowly over the next hour or so, to make sure my stomach didn't have any problems with this new experience. Everything was fine, and the onset of bodily relaxation came quickly, though my mind remained clear. After the first mug I felt like it would be fine to drink the second one I had reserved, so I slowly consumed that too. Despite the heavy feeling in my body, it never did make me drowsy, so I played SWTOR until 3:30am and then read DV and some LD books to prep for bed, retiring at 4:30am. I should note that I never felt any trace of euphoria, either, an effect that some had noted. That didn't bother me, though: my only interest was in enhancing my dreams.

Unfortunately, in that respect, the kava kava was a total bust. It was no different from any ordinary night of crappy dreaming: I was vaguely aware of dreaming most of the night, but my recall was terrible and what details I could specify were mostly mundane day residue. There was no sense of complex overarching plots, just lots of little random scenarios. Lots of people have written that kava helped them sleep more deeply and wake refreshed, but I didn't experience that either: I woke three times in the first several hours of sleep, which is typical, except that I felt much groggier than usual during those brief wakeful periods. At 9:00am I woke up and felt so unpleasantly lethargic, mentally as well as phsyically, and the dreaming had been so disappointing, that I decided to try to clear my head with an ample dose of piracetam. That stuff is amazing: to preserve its efficacy I save it for special occasions, but it always works really well to clear up any "brain fog."

Within fifteen minutes I was feeling complete mental clarity, so I decided to turn it into a proper WBTB. I added some L-theanine, alpha-GPC and bacopa and returned to bed using WILD technique. My focus was still subpar and I couldn't count effectively, so I initially fell into non-lucid sleep, but gradually became more aware of the dream as it progressed. There was no "aha" moment of lucidity, but I was definitely lucid by the end.

In conclusion, the kava kava didn't seem to improve my dreaming in the slightest, but at least it didn't suppress it either. If anything helped me get lucid, I believe it was the piracetam and other supplements I took at WBTB, because those I've had success with many times before. My recall was poor for most of the night, and even after waking up from the LD only the last scene was initially clear; recollection of the earlier incidents revived only after I started tracing back the course of events.

DILD, "Creating a Cat": I was hanging out with a friend, JM, and her young son. [DR: yesterday I had seen a picture of this kid that she had posted on Facebook.] The little boy was telling us a story about a butterfly who took care of him in the place he used to be. It sounded like he was talking about before he was born, and this reminded me of a book I had learned about last night, about a project to compile and investigate accounts of young children who claim to have memories of past lives. [DR: Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life, 2015.] After I mentioned the book to my friend, she told me about the time she took her son to an island off the coast of Wales (the named started with a 'T', something like "Tirnagal" or "Tiriagal") and he had started talking about how he used to live there. As she describes this, suddenly we both turn and stare as we hear the boy start speaking another language with the somber intonations of an adult. I have no idea what Welsh sounds like, but what the boy is saying definitely has the structures of a formal language—it is not just childish babble. The experience is so uncanny that I feel the hairs on my arms rise. Before I leave, I say to my friend, "The only thing I regret about not having a kid is the way it can sometimes provide unexpected insights into the human experience." [DR: This comment might also have been inspired by something I was reading last night, on p.163 of The Ego Tunnel, by Thomas Metzinger (2009), where he describes a toddler who falls and looks to his mother for social cues about how to emotionally react.]

I leave my friend's apartment and go outside. Now I'm on a beach. This is one of my most distinctive and common dream signs, despite the fact that I have little interest in beaches in WL and rarely visit them. I think it is related to the tide, a phenomenon that has always unsettled me. Despite the frequency and distinctiveness of this dream sign, for some reason it is one that I always have trouble recognizing as such. On this occasion I already have some degree of dream-awareness, but I lack awareness of that awareness, the metacognition that is characteristic of true lucidity.

As I'm walking along the beach, the sand looks soft and warm and comfortable, and I can't resist the temptation to lie down in it. Initially I am lying on my stomach, but then I roll onto my back, and feel as cozy as a kid making snow angels. I pause to reflect, why do you never hear of kids making sand angels? My comfort is soon disturbed by rippling in the sand... I notice that the whole beach is now billowing and subsiding, the dunes rolling like great waves. "Is it supposed to do that?" I vaguely wonder, and then a particularly large dune threatens to bury me, forcing me back on my feet to keep my balance. Though not quite lucid at this point, I have instinctive awareness of my mastery and control in this environment: I find it easy to "surf" these sand waves as they roll by underfoot. But they are getting even bigger, and I have the impression that the water is now rising rapidly as well, so I decide to find higher ground.

At the edge of the beach I find a stairwell leading up into a building. Getting into it takes some creative climbing, as there are various panels of transparent plexiglass serving as barriers, but I manage to circumvent them and get inside. The stairs emerge into the center of a dim, semi-industrial space, with narrow walkways on all four sides surrounding the wide pit formed by the stairwell in the middle of the room. No sooner have I gotten my bearings than a round hatch covering the end of a large pipe poking through the wall opens, and a humanoid creature crawls out. It is gollum-like, with huge bulging eyes. I don't want to be spotted, so I hold still and focus on being invisible. I feel a moment of relief as the creature initially descends the stairs, but it comes back promptly joined by a second person, a male human. As they approach the spot where I'm standing, I retreat into a corner to avoid them: even if they can't see me, they might blunder into me by accident if I'm not careful. On the bright side, having to strategize in this tense situation is improving my lucid awareness.

I reflect that my "invisibility" is just a mind trick: I am willing the DCs not to see me, and from their lack of reaction I assume it is working, but I can still see my own body plainly. This bothers me—at this point I'm a fairly experienced dreamer, so shouldn't I be able to dispense with a body? I've had no dearth of NLDs where I'm just a disembodied perspective, so surely I should be able to accomplish the same thing in my LDs. I decide to try to eliminate my dream body.

My body does obediently disappear from my field of vision, but the trouble is I still *feel* like I'm in a human body, with two legs, two arms, and two eyes located frontally in my head. If I have really transcended the body, I should no longer feel like I am mapped onto a human being. I conclude that I should begin subverting the pattern, and my first attempt is to try to shift my visual apparatus to floor level. This seems like it should be a fairly easy, basic task, but I find that I have trouble with it, maybe because I get caught up in questions like, well, if I'm not seeing out of physical eyes, then shouldn't my vision be even more radically different—unconstrained by frontality, for instance?

Meanwhile the man and gollum-like creature disappear into a side door, still apparently oblivious to my presence. I retrace my steps to the top of the stairs and examine the hatch that the latter had crawled out of. I consider going in there to explore, but decide that from the look of the creature and the size of the hatch, it will probably just be a cramped and uncomfortable network of tunnels. Instead I decide to follow the two through the side door.

I find myself in a large, open exhibition space with various vendors and booths. I pause for a moment to wonder why spaces like this are so common in my dreams. I don't know if this was a product of false memory or else better access to dream memory than I have in waking life, because at the time I was under the impression that I encountered such rooms on a regular basis; now that I'm awake I don't feel like they're especially common. At first I was just wandering around with no specific purpose, when it occurred to me that I shouldn't waste this opportunity to work on some tasks. There are a ton of things on my docket, but nothing especially pressing, so I thought over a few possibilities and decided to work on my Ars Magica forms and techniques—the other day I printed out the whole list of combinations and decided I should make it a long-term goal to try out all of them eventually.

I recalled that "creo animál" was the first one on my list that I had not tried, so I started intoning, "Creo animál!" I lengthened the syllables in a resonant voice, putting emphasis on the first syllable of "creo" and the last syllable of "animál." I repeated the invocation a few times in this manner, staring at an empty patch of floor. I didn't have a clear idea in mind of what kind of animal I wanted to create, but I thought I could leave that open for the dream to surprise me. However, nothing was happening. I thought perhaps I needed some raw materials, so I telekinetically lifted a nearby booth (hoping this wouldn't be too much inconvenience to the vendor) and pulled it into the space where I was working, then focused on compacting its form and shape into something suitable to my purpose. It folded itself up obediently until it was much smaller. However, I felt like I needed to impose a pattern on it since the dream wasn't responding with anything, so I arbitrarily chose the form of a cat. People started gathering around to watch the show as the booth finished its transformation, and now there was a short-haired black and white cat sitting stiffly on the floor. [In retrospect, the technique was closer to "muto" than "creo," since I adapted existing material rather than conjuring it from thin air.]

The newly-created cat was not moving, and did not seem capable of movement; it was like an empty shell of a cat, a living doll. This made sense, since I had created the body but not endowed it with sentience: I concluded that this would require a separate effect. Luckily this concurred with another task I needed to work on. "Creo mentem," I said, directing my words at the cat, and this time the effect resolved quickly: now the cat seemed to be capable of moving and perceiving its environment.

I wondered if "mentem" alone was sufficient: wouldn't that create something with the bland mental workings of a robot? Wouldn't I need to add "imáginem" to endow it with emotions and imagination, the "spark of life"? I wasn't sure, but I thought I'd better throw that in for good measure, so I intoned "Creo imáginem," focusing on giving the creature the capacity for emotions and inner life. Immediately I had doubts about whether this was wise. I don't know if my doubts were caused by the cat's behavior or if the cat's behavior was conditioned by my doubts, but whichever it was, the creature did not look pleased. It was lashing its tail in the way cats do when they're annoyed, and its face was contorted into a savage snarl. I wondered if throwing in "imáginem" had been overkill—emotions are not always pleasant, after all, and a creature so unexpectedly brought into existence might well be feeling upset and disoriented. Plus, I didn't even know if "imáginem," was necessary for a complete being; perhaps sentience was sufficiently specified by "mentem." [Consulting the Ars Magica rulebook now, I see that I misremembered the scope of of the Form: "imáginem" deals with sensations and illusions, not emotions and imagination. Though actually that makes the whole Form seem superfluous to the dreamstate, where there is no obvious difference between creating a thing and creating an illusion of that thing.]

I knelt down to have a closer look at my creation, and felt even more disturbed. There was something awful and abject about its face, a wound or rot-like distortion of its jaw that left the teeth clearly visible through its cheek. [DR: I realize this might also be day residue, because recently I was reading articles about the so-called "zombie cat" which came with graphic pictures of a similarly disfigured animal.] I decided that I should try to understand what this cat was experiencing, so I said, "Intéllego animál." I felt impressions of fear and rage coming from the poor creature, and guiltily realized that I must have screwed up somehow. It made it even worse that it was a cat, a kind of animal for which I feel a great love and sympathy.



With a sweeping gesture I willed all the effects I had invoked to disperse, effectively uncreating the cat. I didn't have a clear visual sense of the result (did the body simply disappear or did the vendor's booth revert to its former shape? I'm not sure), but at least I felt that the spell had ended. I looked up at the spectators who had been watching the whole event and sheepishly apologized: "It didn't want to be a cat. I'm sorry. It just didn't work out."

One woman spoke up in reply. Her words were uttered very calmly and slowly, emphasizing each of the adjectives, and I felt like she was subtly criticizing my actions: "People want to be fair, and dominating, and controlling, and diverting."