Voices

Ritual: Woke up at dawn after a DILD in which I was joyously flying over a gorgeous verdant landscape and admiring an enormous white castle. The detailed report took two pages and I do not see the need to reproduce them here, however, I am amused to see that my initial notes on it look like an odd little poem: party, <PERSON> in kitchen bird ceiling, sky oh, this is a dream, is not it fly up, clarity, joy look at that castle, it is huge! hello everyone, hello! While flying around I wondered if I should try a TOTM, and remembered that February was ending but that I had not looked at the March list yet. After recording that dream, I reviewed the new TOTMs and went back to bed. At first I tried my vibrating alarm, but after an hour of unproductive sleep, decided that my state of mind was not suitable for that method and took it off. It was 8am by this point and my hopes were not high, so all I did was think about the TOTMs as I went back to bed. I was especially drawn to the one where you ask DCs about their dream, because I thought I remembered planning to try that myself at one point but had never gotten around to it. I actually did end up having another DILD in which I performed this task, but it was not very satisfying because I failed to wake and write promptly. This was annoying because during the dream itself I had been taking pains to try to remember the specific responses given by the DCs, but by the time I woke up fully at almost 10am, my memories had become blurred and vague. Here is what I can piece back together. DILD: I was in a room with three male friends when I realized I was dreaming, and that the presence of the DCs was a perfect set up for the task I wanted to try. I approached one of the guys and asked him to tell me about a dream he had recently. He said something to the effect that he did not remember any dreams but was curious about them. What would it be like not to dream, I wondered--to be aware only of the moments when one is actually awake? It sounds like a kind of half-existence, a disturbing prospect. I went over to the second guy, who was sitting on a barstool nearby, and discovered that his appearance had changed. Now he resembled... a jawa? Except his robe was red... no, a dark pink. Weird. When he spoke, his voice sounded high and girlish. I do not remember the details of his reply, but it was also in the negative. No dreams to report. I approached the third guy and asked if he remembered any dreams. My hopes were not high, but I was pleasantly surprised when he said he had dreamed about a location where HEMA could be practiced. (HEMA stands for Historical European Martial Arts, something I have been practicing since last year.) He started telling me about a weapon that he called a "brouheea" or something like that. I could not make sense of the word and asked him to repeat it a few times, so he showed me an example of one that was in a display case on the wall. It was shaped like a tiny axe, about six inches long, and the label demonstrated that the word had a complex spelling with a silent last syllable, like "Brouheeages." I thought it sounded vaguely Dutch. When I finally woke up some time later, it was frustrating not to be able to recall if the three guys, who I had thought of as "friends" within the context of the dream, had represented specific WL friends or had simply been random DCs who felt familiar at the time (I get this a lot).