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WILD 1
Thu 25 October 2007
So, I arrived in the office car park again and laid down in the back seat. I was using an idea that I read on one of the forums where you slowly and almost imperceptibly move two of your fingers on one hand to a rhythm. This is supposed to keep your mind active whilst your body falls asleep. At the same time, I was imagining myself lying on some grass next to a lake. I was hoping to arrive in that position in my dream.I have some confused images of being able to see myself asleep in the back of my car. Some rough looking kids were playing football outside and occassionally bashing the car with the ball (this was all in my mind). I was aware of trying to 'escape' from my body and slip into the dream world. I tried kind of rolling my body away, but it didn't work. I've read that between being awake and reaching your dream state, your body goes into something called 'sleep paralysis', where your mind is active but your body is paralysed. The idea of your body being paralysed makes sense to me, because it would be dangerous for your body to be active whilst having all sorts of crazy dreams. Some people report that they find it difficult to get into the lucid dream from the state of sleep paralysis. I think that this is possibly what was happening to me.
After a while, I'm aware of a small patch of grass in front of my vision, surrounded by blackness. I am able to 'zoom in' to the grass so that it fills more of my vision. I zoom in even further, and I can see it all with great clarity - the green of the grass, and all sorts of small plants and leaves mixed in with it. I feel as if I can stand up on the grass, but as I do so, it zooms away from me and I feel as if I am not yet quite in the dream. So, I move back towards it and let it fill my vision again. I try standing up again and the same thing happens. So instead, I lie close to the ground and look above and around me. I'm in my mum's back garden at night time. Strangely, there are two street lights shining down, providing two patches of light. I think that it would be helpful if it were daytime, so I try to force my will upon the environment and make it so. I fail.
Since I am able to keep clarity and stay inside the dream by being close to the ground, I decide to have a crawl about. I go past the edge of a flower bed, but it contains no plants - just soil. I remember the 'growing the seed' task that I tried in my first lucid dream. I failed that time because I wasn't able to find a seed. Since there are bound to be seeds and spores in the soil already, I think I might stand a better chance here. So, I concentrate on the flower bed, and all sorts of shoots, mosses and things start to writhe about as if in a time-lapse film. I get bored of this after a few seconds, but I now feel as if my dream is sufficiently stable for me to stand up and go somewhere exciting. So, I stand up but the dream isn't as clear as I'd like it to be, so I try another new technique for increasing clarity. I rub my hands together vigorously. It works.
The idea of this hand rubbing technique is that the perceived feeling of your hands distracts you from the real-life feeling of your sleeping body. It's hard to explain why, but I remember being partially aware of my sleeping body whilst being in my dream. As if there were two parts of me.
So, I decide to leave my mum's garden, as there are bound to be more exciting things to do elsewhere. I leave through the gate at the side of the house. Through the gate, the street is in daylight. I decide that going into our next door neighbour's house might be interesting (I've never been in this particular building before), so I walk up their drive. The building looks different to what it looks like in real life. It looks kind of like the house that my wife and I stayed in for part of our holiday in France - like a ramshackle farmhouse.
The door is open, and I nervously go down the steps into a corridor. I am aware that somebody lives in this house and they probably won't be happy to find me here.
The walls are all peeling and dilapidated. I come to a junction. To the right is a kitchen area. I look to the left. There is a mattress on the floor, with simple sheets in disarray. I have a very bad feeling about this place. It's not very much fun. So, I leave quickly and go back to the street.
I still want to go somewhere interesting, so I decide that the best way to do that (in an exciting way) would be to find a motorbike and ride it away. So, I start walking up the street and looking in driveways. The driveways are either empty, or they have old, slow, knackered mopeds in them. There are no people about, and no cars on the roads.
Thinking back, there were no cars in the driveways because I was expecting to find either motorbikes or nothing.
I decide to change tactics, so after rubbing my hands to increase clarity again (for some reason, I'm now wearing gloves), I walk out into the road with the intention of knocking riders off of bikes in the style of Grand Theft Auto.
Three motorcycles with their headlights on appear together in the distance. They race towards me and I attempt to jump up and take out the riders. They all manage to avoid me. And now, cars start to come down the street, and I have to avoid [i]them[/i], sometimes jumping over them. I'm aware that vehicles are probably crashing further behind me. When people on roller skates start coming down the road, I decide that it's all a bit much and turn to walk down the road. There is a bus at the side a little way away and I decide that I might as well get on the bus to go somewhere exciting.
So, I head off towards the bus, but I am distracted as I walk past a newsagent's. Again, I wake up directly from sleeping.
I am surprised, as very little time has passed in the real world. I try to get back to sleep and into another dream, but find it really difficult and I give up.