Dream: "One for East" LUCID

I don’t remember the exact point when I realized I was dreaming. This dream was long and complicated, and I forgot quite a bit of it upon waking; it was like having seen a long movie, and not remembering every scene.

Dream 20041008, 7:10 AM:

I remember casting a magic circle, making pentacles at each of the quarters. I have something small and metallic in my hand; it’s like a key on a chain. As I draw each of the pentacles, I concentrate on seeing it drawn out mid-air with a blue line – it works, but it’s very vague, like the afterimage from where you’ve seen a bright light. I have been trying to do this in dream-magick work, to help make my visualizations of the process stronger. Instead of a long phrase invoking each of the watchtowers, I say, in sort of a stage-whisper, “One for East,” etc. I’m drawing the circle around a section of neighborhood; I remark to myself that I usually just work it around the house, or the room I’m in, but for some reason it seems like the right thing to do it around this larger area, walking down parts of streets to get to the quarter points. Because of the way the streets are laid out, I’m not really going around the circle, but tracing a cross in the center, each time going back to the middle and out to that edge. When I get to West, I mix it up and say North first, then realize my mistake, correct myself, and then do North to finish. There’s not any real sense of the circle changing once I’ve gotten all the way around, and I can’t see a shield or any visible sign of the circle, other than the pentacles.

I don’t remember why I get into the car, but I am in a large car, riding in the back seat. It’s one of the huge mid-eighties boat-cars, like my parents used to drive; something like an Olds 88. It’s pale colored, like cream or yellow. I remember fiddling with the window buttons in the back seat; they seem to control music instead of the windows. I see a nice-looking guy walking along, and tell whoever’s driving to stop the car; I open the far-side rear door (I’m sitting in the rear passenger-side seat) and he gets in, albeit a little startled. He’s handsome, but not amazingly so; he’s lean, and sandy blond, and more pretty than rugged. I lean over as if I’m going to start making out with him, but he startles and pulls back. I ask him if he’s refraining from making out with me to make the dream last longer; my lucid dreams often disintegrate once they turn sexual. He tells me that I should just back off, and keep to my own side. I do, and stare out the window at the sky – I know that skies can be amazingly beautiful in dreams, and I sometimes find interesting patterns going on there. There is glare on the glass, but after tipping my head a little, I can see the blue sky. There are a few wispy white clouds, and also some soft-white dots in a grid pattern, but it’s really not remarkable. I look around, and see the sun setting between some buildings in a beautiful blaze of gold, which I enjoy.

I don’t remember arriving at a particular destination, but we are out of the car and walking. First, we’re walking through an old-world type village, with stone buildings and twisty streets. Then, it shifts, and it’s more like a shopping mall – still cobblestones and facades of buildings, but now they’re like little shops. The man is still with me, and we stop and look at a little fountain in a courtyard area. He reaches in, playing with the water, and gets the long sleeves of his shirt wet. I touch the water, enjoying the feel of it in the dream state; it’s very cool, and kind of velvety.

We go through a door and into a series of rooms; they shift, and now it’s not so much shops, as rooms in a colossal house. There is a large hallway, and we walk along looking into room after room. I’m very conscious that it’s a dream, and I’m enjoying the scenes in the rooms, many of which contain neat furniture and art, and are brilliantly colored with dark jewel tones. I remember seeing several statues of little plump women figures in masks; they remind me of Michael Parkes’ work, combining his plump woman from “Rain” with the masks that he puts on several of his figures. The faces remind me of this sphinx.

Now, the house has a giant central open atrium, with hallways of rooms on either side; I walk along one hall with the rooms to my left, the open atrium off to my right. I duck under a bunch of hanging clothes on a line, into a room at the end of the hallway. I decide that this will be a good time to check stability in the lucid state, so I dance around a little bit (which always helps invigorate my dreambody) and rub my hands together, then clap them together a couple of times. I notice that I have something on my fingertips, like the residue from working with glue, and I pick at this stuff and peel it off like a spare skin in little bits. I realize that the man walking along with me hasn’t followed me into this room, and I poke my head back through the curtain of hanging clothes, to see him shrugging into a navy sweatshirt with some print on the front, like a University name. He says that he was wet from the fountain earlier, and needed to change.

I don’t know why, but I become aware of my sleeping body, and my neck shifts in just the right way to make my back go *crick*, and I wake up. I tried to drift back into the dream, but couldn’t.