FA(6)= A + B
that I thought was supposed to be this mathematical formula:
FA(6) (divided by) 36
Then I woke up, in the pre-dawn light. And went back to sleep, though it took more effort than last time to pull the dreams back over my head.
I pondered over the math problem back at my apartment, with my mother helping me with it as she redecorated. I wasn't sure how old I was. Looking out the window, I could see the stormclouds rolling between the buildings. One of them looked so much like a giant long-haired lap dog that I exclaimed at it. My mother pointed out that what I thought were clouds actually were giant flying long-haired lapdogs.
Not really flying, their paws tottered over empty space. Each of these stormcloud lapdogs looked at least as tall as two levels of the apartment building right across the street from us, the space around which they tottered.
I watched the man in the apartment building across the street toss Great Danes and giant Dalmatians out his window to accompany the clouds. He even fell out himself, once, and his other dogs leaped out to follow him like lemmings, but instead of hitting the pavement in a gory mess they all just vaporized halfway down.
?!??!
I was watching them from the safety of my apartment window, until I was watching them from the middle of an endlessly long rope bridge suspended precariously over the city. In a dreamlike transition I didn't catch.
The empty lot below me spilled with grass and characters from Wonderland. I wondered, while waving at the giant black cat that did not grin, that Alice in Wonderland was a kind of early version of The Matrix. I continued to wonder, naturally, if we're dreams of dreams, or dreams of robots, or if we spent our whole lives just dreaming oursel--
Ah-ha.
I crawled backwards on the bridge and into one of the towers that it slung from, now lucidly dreaming. Inside the tower, the closed concrete walls relieved me of the vertigo and I made my way down the green-painted steel stairwell. I hoped it wouldn't go on too long, the bridge was so high and I didn't know how long I could maintain lucidity. It ended at the second landing, and lead out to a city sidewalk. (Um, I didn't do that. Couldn't have done that, with just hope. Could I?)
I sometimes consider how dreams make very convincing imitations of waking life-- I mean, not just the natural mindset that makes us take that dream-reality for granted. For example, the stairwell banisters had been cold to the touch, the steel panels thrumming subtly as my foot struck each step and that thrumming crept all the way up to my teeth. The air in the stairwell smelled stale. The city pavement looked irregularly gritty, and each of the hundreds of pedestrians had a different outfit and way of walking. Every strand of hair gradating the light, casting a strand of shadow, showing distinctly on the stormcloud lap dogs.
This was impressive.
The last time I expected to manifest a whole different scenery, I spiraled into a nightmarish sleep paralysis. So, this time, ticking off my mission to rediscover my inner mentor (who is based off an external mentor) I just lay down in the middle of the street and ... well, prayed, really... that Dr. Hegel* would be one of the hundreds of people passing by.
And then she was, or something like her. She wore a pair of strappy silver heels, and a beaded translucent hem of a white gown was very unlike her, but she was the only one to stop and kneel down to pull me up... which met my definition. Of course, I didn't know her as a person very well.
Taking the psychological perspective that all dream characters are a part of us, I was relieved to see this dream character in decent condition (the last non-lucid dream I had of her, she was melting.) So, what with that already established I thought I would move on to testing the feasibility of Shared Dreams.
I screamed, "Wake up and contact me! Contact me! Wake up!" and slapped Dream Dr. Hegel across the face until she disappeared.
More sample numbers required, I decided, and walked into the mall looking for other people that I knew in waking life who I could ask the next day if they'd dreamed of me (slapping them across the face). The mall's corridors turned it into hotel rooms, or hotel conference rooms, with rows of wooden doors. Doors. I can do the Lucid Crossroads thing, I thought, and opened one of the doors up to a dark room. No, not a room-- an abyssal, evil vacuum. So, I shut it against force of the wind, and thought of sunshine, and thought of slate tiling, and opened the door once more...
... to find a windy abyssal evil vacuum waiting within. I sighed, rolled my eyes, slammed the door shut in frustration, and moved on to the next door.
The next door had fluorescent ceiling lights, off-white painted walls with no windows, blue-gray carpeting from wall to wall, and about twenty people sitting on wood-block stairs to the right and talking amongst each other. Nobody I could recognize. The left side of the room remained empty. I guessed I could teleport from here if I spun around, so I did, and the people sitting on the steps applauded because the spinning technique failed to teleport me but got me floating in circles and loops.
The people and the steps weren't there when I stopped and righted myself. There was only a strobe light, and a bag of dry cat food, in the room with me. Embarrassed to have made a spectacle of myself, I floated out of the room. The hall had turned into the mall gardens. It was a sunny day, and the world in my head didn't seem to be doing anything I wanted it to at all, so I decided to go for a flight.
The clouds looked more fake than the city and the dogs. They were kind of visual-only, like a moving painting, and they passed slowly even though I flew as fast as I could. A man's face appeared like a pencil sketch and mouthed words to me, something like "You might think this is what you want..." and showing me the new Lucid Crossroads, "...but this is what you'll get..." switching the vision to one of the old Lucid Crossroads. The speaker looked a little like a pencil sketch of Joss Whedon in the sky.
But mostly it was a dimensionless blue sky and moving painted clouds. I looked back at the mall, saw the stone garden path and the flat shingles on the roof far below... and a pool.
Dolphins! I thought, I can do this month's LD4all.Com challenge! and flew down to the swimming pool, or tried, but I was stuck in disembodied, floating, omnipresent perspective. I tried to remedy that by getting a feel for my dream-body, but it seemed to cross into feeling out for my sleeping physical body and I felt myself waking.
(Or did I?)
"Would you come to the dining room already," my mother hissed, "We have Guests!"
I remembered, now, Auntie Dolce and her niece had come over for a very small dinner party.
I walked to the dining room to meet them and apologize. The niece had on a translucent beaded gown over the rest of her clothes, and I thought, Oh, so that's where I got that dream image from. She was wearing it when she came in, before my nap. What was the occasion? Graduation, confirmation, debut? I didn't even know the girl that well because this girl doesn't actually exist. Auntie Dolce doesn't have a niece.
The conversation wasn't particularly out of the ordinary. Niece spoke of her high school immersion project where she went to a place where friendly fish that swam in the air turned into a swarm of bumblebees. Eventually I excused myself to type up the lucid dream I had.
Funny if this was a false awakening, and I would have to type the dream all over again, I thought as I walked to the computer. But, when I willed myself to float as a reality check, my feet stayed on the ground. I remembered how I got there. So, I decided that I definitely was awake.
The URL for ld4all.com brought me to hotmail.com which wasn't even close, and that was a clue that I was still in a dream...
So I really woke up. It was morning, and there never was a dinner party.
*not her real name
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