Verre

I was participating in the Tour de France, except there were no bicycles involved. At first I was swimming in a river. There were other people swimming around me, including little babies and their mothers. The babies were eligible for a special award if they could swim well on their own, but in one case we noticed the mother secretly helping her infant by supporting it from under the water, so it was disqualified.

I didn't like being stuck in a group of people, so I exerted some effort to swim ahead of them and find my own space. It made me think about the huge variation in human athletic ability. In a long distance race like this, some people were already hours ahead. I figured I was probably somewhere in the middle, and I was sure that there would still be people hours behind me. I didn't feel any pressure to compete against others or try to finish the race quickly; it felt like the sort of event that one could complete at one's own speed.

Under the water I could see seaweed in a form that resembled bundles of thick green ropes, stretching endlessly in the direction the river flowed. They looked like they were flowing along too, so I grabbed them to see if I could catch a ride, but they were moving slower than I could swim on my own so I let go again. The race course led me out of the river and now I was running on land down a quiet little house-lined street, like a small village.

I was still thinking about that strange ropy seaweed. It had reminded me of thick cables of the sort that might carry electricity or another kind of signal. What would it be like if our society used biological materials like this for our technological infrastructure? I decided to try out the material, so I manifested a hand made out of the same stuff as the seaweed. It resembled a human hand in shape but was not connected to a body, and was light green in color. Mischievously, I made the hand crawl up the porch of the nearest house and pull the string of the bell that hung on the doorframe.

The door opened, and inside I was surprised to see that the one who opened it was not a human but a chicken, an ordinary-looking hen. She must have been a Plymouth Rock, judging from her black and white barred plumage. It reminded me of a silly line I'd heard somewhere, so I joked, "There's nobody here but us chickens!" She didn't make any response—maybe she didn't know that one?—and I was still running so I soon passed by.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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