Date: 17/12/2020
Method of entry: dream consciousness
Bedtime: 1am
Awakening: 6.45am
Return to bed: 7am
Awakening: 8.25am
Attempt: successful
Phase experience: Libby and Beano
REM sleep having returned to bed around 7am is characterised by vivid dreaming displaying cues about the illusory nature of my experience: moving house during a pandemic (never); smoking (I quit months ago); being excited about finding a couple of bags of cannabis on the floor (I'm done with its recreational use); organising a housewarming (out of my mind in a silly dream state).
I go to bed (mattress on the floor) with my wife in this strange new house. I hear footsteps and my youngest son opens the bedroom door to say he's not feeling well and needs a day off school. 'What's the matter?' I say while I get up to examine him. 'My back hurts', he replies. His back reveals a strange bruise and I send him back to bed. Beyond the room, I see my eldest son go to the kitchen to make himself breakfast. At the end of the hallway (abode now resembling the one in waking life), Kayci, his girlfriend, has the front door open and she's having a cigarette. I walk towards the entrance to look at the morning view outside, expecting to see the spacious, public lawn which is shared by many neighbours but typically deserted at dawn, only to discover my false awakening situation.
I'm shocked to find a vast park replete with people noisily congregating, and the colossal industrial buildings in the background clearly defying the logic of being remote from commercial areas and living by a river in waking life. 'Is this a lucid dream?' I ask Kayci. 'Yes.'
I push my right hand through the door jamb and watch my limb being engulfed up to my elbow by the wood with barely any resistance. I notice my former neighbour Libby in the bustling park, beckoning to me in her typically risqué manner whenever she had a reefer to share. As her mischievously grinning form wiggles her long index fingernail, I realise the risk of being lured into an ordinary dream state.
I run through the crowd in the opposite direction to beckoning Libby, desperately trying to remember the plan of action I had only just written down prior to bedtime. I frantically run and leap, annoyed that I can't remember one single step of the plan, and partially disturbed at the prospect of a premature collapse of the phase state. I could ask Libby for mnemonic clues, but she vanished, and a demented life-size Beano-like character is chasing me around this crazy playground. I find him very distracting and I feel like it would be impossible to reason with him.
I wake up, content and slightly annoyed, with white noise petering out in my head. I make notes to remind myself to rehearse the plan of action in imagination prior to the next attempt and that in the phase total control is attainable. The Libby and Beano simulations would have bent to my will.
Bollocks. I'm starting to think that Beano character represented Minecraft.
Even though I was in the phase, it seems the memory of the first step of my plan of action was externalised rather than internalised in the form of recall. That's why he kept chasing me! It was a Minecraft character and therefore what I wanted. A clue.
If this theory is correct, I failed to recognise him as such---finding him distracting and avoiding him instead. That is weird!
