Date of dream: Thursday, June 30, 2011
Level of Lucidity:
Level of Cohesiveness:
Rating:
Lucid Intent?
Yes
Lucid Technique: RT
This dream has been viewed 578 times.
From The Original Dream Notes: 2-28-81 A.D. RICE (All About The Dragon)
At first notice I am dreaming, find myself seated near left end of a conference table. There is a young, black-haired Oriental (Japanese?) woman in the seat on my left, the chair closest to the corner, and another, older, taller woman with light brown hair and broad, Oriental features seated on the opposite side, across from her. We three are the only ones at the table and the only ones in the conference room. I recognize the young, dark-haired woman as someone I know, but the person seated across from us is a stranger to me. We seem to be waiting for something, or maybe just taking a break from some kind of activity. When I first become lucid, the other two are chatting, as if I’m not paying any attention. Taking advantage of my supposed inattention, the friend at my left pantomimes dusting my shoulder and catching snowflakes two or three times. They stage whisper in sing-song voices and giggle behind their hands. The one across the table looks worried when I glance up at her, so I bring my attention to the one on my left I have been calling “my friend.”
THIS IS THE END OF THE DREAM, fromhere on I am awake.
(This is where the dream sets the stage for the dreamer to finish the “last act” after waking up. The lucid plot goes directly from lucid asleep to lucid awake, without losing the train of thought. LUCID AWAKE FROM HERE. My first waking thought is to scold. “That is not polite. You must be talking about me, since you don’t want me to understand,” is the first thought that comes to mind. Then, more fully awake, I think, “What is this? Will I show my displeasure by moving over to the right-hand end of the table? No, that does not seem to complete the story. What am I supposed to say next?” This seems OK: “You have touched the dragon, now demand your gift.” In the lingering dream scenario my young, dark-haired friend sits silent and wary. “Don’t you think the dragon knows it is a dragon? and that sometimes its scales show? and sometimes it can’t help breathing fire? and sometimes it forgets not everyone else knows how to fly?” The scenario remains unchanged. She sits wide-eyed, making no move and no answer.
(But this addition to the dream is satisfying the need for a proper ending.) “Here, I owe you a gift, even if you don’t demand it. Take this shiny bracelet to your Mother. Maybe she can instruct you about polite conduct when in the presence of a dragon.” END OF ORIGINAL NOTES ON THE LUCID DREAM AND LUCID AWAKE.
An immediate, same day product from this dream is the spontaneous invention of the following, full-blown “legend.” Normally, all that would have remained to me would have been the legend, but this time I captured the dream before it faded. THE LEGEND It is said that dragons can disguise themselves and walk among people. The reason they can do this is that they are so good at it, they even forget they are dragons themselves. However, they are not perfect at it, and sometimes their scales show and sometimes they breathe fire and sometimes they forget everybody else does not know how to fly. It is said, if a person notices and thinks fast enough to touch the dragon at such a moment, the dragon knows you know, and you can demand a gift in exchange for your solemn oath not to reveal the dragon. As long as you keep the gift, you keep the knowledge of where that dragon walks, even after the dragon forgets it is a dragon again. You then have the power to make the dragon your friend forever, if you choose. As the dragon’s friend, you can use the gift to remind the dragon it is a dragon if ever you need to ask the dragon part of your friend a favor. It is said, if you sell the gift or lose it, you will immediately forget your secret about the dragon, (which is why dragons willingly part with valuable things.) They favor jewels. The dragon hopes you will let the gift go. If the dragon is able to get the gift back from some other source, the dragon knows its secret is safe once more.
THIS IS THE END OF THE LEGEND. ADDITIONAL COMMENTS: Intrigued to discover I had invented a “legend,” (and still somewhat intimidated by the dream that created it,) I did some research.
(From the encyclopedia:) In the Chinese Zodiac, dragon is the sign for March. Japanese dragons: RIO (?) & TATSU. TATSU - “seen rising from stormy waves on the ocean & floating among the clouds.”
THIS DREAM PROVED TO UNLEASH THE MOST PRODUCTIVE, CREATIVE LINE OF THOUGHT I HAVE HAD IN A NUMBER OF YEARS.
At the next evening adult oil painting class, I switched from my usual pedestrian still-lifes and scenery and sketched a whole bunch of fanciful dragons. I ended up with a very satisfactory 16' X 24" painting depicting a dragon flying in the clouds with a luminous, round white object clutched to its chest. This made people ask “What is the dragon doing,” and gave me a chance to mention it is a “Dream Product.”
It became a great conversation piece. For the first time since the beginning of memory, I began to talk freely to people about dreams on a regular basis. Below are some of the answers that evolved to the oft-repeated question: “What is the dragon doing?”
PERHAPS it is a male dragon who has just bested an old sorcerer in a game of riddles and won the sorcerer’s crystal ball and all the sorcerer’s silk magicians’ scarves in the bargain.
PERHAPS it is a lady dragon with a dragon egg, gathering streamers to build a fine nest to set it in. (Maybe it’s a baby boy egg, since all the streamers are blue.) PERHAPS the dragon is just coming back from the ocean where it regaled all the sea creatures with such fantastic, glorious stories that they gave it the biggest pearl in the world for a prize, (and long curly streamers of seaweed caught in its toes while it danced the hornpipe for an encore.) PERHAPS the dragon has rolled up the sunshine from off the clouds like a snowball, to use as a lantern when it flies into the nighttime side of the world. THIS LAST ANSWER IS THE ONE CHILDREN LIKE THE BEST.
This dream is the first from a series that later produces “Stone Dragon Steps” and others. We all have many dream themes in progress at any given time, just as in our waking lives we mentally follow every event of interest or necessity that comes to our attention from day to day. The daily soap operas on radio and TV are habit forming, but they are nothing compared to real events and the dreams our minds process during every sleep period, whether we remember them or not
I call this dream “Rice” (because it was so prolific.) It shows how a dreamer can abstract almost any dream into a “story” (or more basically, a “product”) that can be shared freely, without needing or revealing the intimate dream structure that is its source. Sometimes a dream is so transparently clear it becomes difficult to even write it down. Copying RICE for the first time, I found I hesitated to make permanent record of it at all. The same thing happened with STONE DRAGON STEPS, from later on in this series. (Both these “dragon” dreams reveal vital aspects of my own identity without the slightest camouflage.)
Sometimes the creative product is such a radical departure from the dream, a person would be totally unable to say what had triggered the sudden creative work without the captured notations on the dream itself.
I myself have a whole series of creative “dream products” from an earlier creative period between 1955 and 1966. At that time I was not recording dreams, but only using them, so now I have only the products left, without the slightest hint of what the dreams were like. Without dream records and accurate dates, they do little to explain dream thinking. At best, they give clues to some of the thoughts that seemed important to me during those years.
This inscrutable little oriental gem I call Rice started me on a creative roll that has lasted until now. The dream part of this opening episode is so small and so plain, I still find it hard to believe it was the origin of such an extensive dream series that continues to be so marvelously productive. I credit much of the continuing creativity to the fact I still have the dream itself for reference. The incongruity of the dream and the resulting “legend” never fail to make me laugh at myself and to get the creative juices flowing again. The ability to laugh and be cheerful seems to be important to creativity.
This truly demonstrates the value of writing or sketching a dream immediately, especially when it happens to be one of those deceptively enigmatic, nothing-much-happening scenarios. It also proves the value of “finishing the last act” to a dream, immediately upon waking. Without the vital, interim finish to the action set up by this one, I might never have continued with the line of thought and found the underlying theme for the entire dragon series. This dream called Rice demonstrates lucid dreaming, lucid awake, finishing the last act, creating a dream product, and turning a dream into action in waking life. It also works on my sense of identity, peace of mind and hope for the future.
This early dream from the series that is writing all this is as advanced, radical and random as any productive lucid dream rendition I have in my records. There seems to be a level in dreams that creates an encounter with a bona fide dragon, no matter what the nature of the dreamer’s philosophy on life. I am willing to go out on a limb with the theory there is an element intrinsically interwoven into each person’s sense of identity that invariably translates into the person’s own idea of a dragon when approached at certain predictable levels in lucid thought, awake or asleep.
I expect this built-in, internal “dragon” guards the border of a person’s mind and memory, protecting all that constitutes the person in the world (and in the universe) from all that which “is not the person.” Until the dragon is “put to rest,” I doubt if an individual is able to make any exchange whatsoever with the “reservoir of universal information” level in dreaming and lucid meditation. I believe the “internal dragon” device is inherent in ordinary thinking and automatically protects the person from accidental mental encounters with everything “not part of the person,” and also prevents anyone from “getting outside” (Astral Projection, Remote Viewing, etc.) herself or himself until the sense of identity is strong enough to hold its own.
Writing this material seems to be strengthening my sense of “what I know about dreaming” to the point where I am able to safely seek out and entertain thoughts of whatever other people are doing with dreams without danger of losing sight of my own, hard-won abilities.
I wonder sometimes, what I might have been doing now, if the works of Edgar Cayce, for instance, had been available to me when I was just a child in grammar school. What a shame so few of us had easy access, (in the course of living normal, ordinary lives,) to the dream work available in the world until the early 1970s.
When I agree people should follow their dreams, I mean it literally, not figuratively, not merely as a figure of speech. Again, I am being intentionally redundant. I am talking the language of dreams and dreams are supremely redundant. They repeat whatever is appropriate to the currently attained dream level, Ad Infinitum, if necessary: until the dreamer grapples with the material, becomes a member to the action, forces the scenarios to respond in a manner that is satisfactory/more pleasing/beneficial to the dreamer.
Suppose your say, you would not want any of your dreams ever to come true. If this is the case, you appear to be mentally consenting to and rehearsing a personal role in possible futures not agreeable to you as a person. Suppose you say, your dreams force you to re-live terrible events you would rather forget. If this is the case, you appear to be agreeing and consenting to the idea it is beyond human imagination to suggest those events might have been resolved in some other shape or form.
If it is your attitude to argue and defend your right to remain the hapless victim on the maelstrom of your mind, you are not my kind of dreamer, and this work is not for you. There must be plenty of others who will commiserate with you in your misery. They are the ones who agree to the wearisome present day status quo and consent to disagreeable possible futures (out of all the possible futures still available to us) that I choose not to promote or contemplate, or support.
I agree whole-heartedly with those who say it is not profitable to habitually dwell on “worst possible” scenarios, past or future. It is said that our inner minds interpret clear, frequent visualizations as desirable personal goals to be vigorously pursued. Our inherent ability to “rise to the occasion” when disasters or tragedies strike is demonstrably dependable. The built-in human survival instinct is twin to the “dragon” and stands ever at the ready to protect us with astounding strengths and remarkable feats of courage when dire emergencies arise.
There is no useful way to practice at coping with adversity. It is the studied ability to cope with life when things “come out better than expected” that takes exquisite planning.
I agree the specter of war hangs over us. Those of us who have entered the second half of our lives (I reached my 50th year in 1984) have a unique perspective. We lived through the 2nd World War and the atomic bombings in Japan. We are able to evaluate the differences between the feel of living with actual world conflict and the feel of living with the continuing nebulous threat of possible impending world conflict.
This continuing threat hangs over civilization like a bad dream that refuses to go away. Many fear that all the various governments in the world are “moribund and if people remain shackled to the corpses, all civilization will be carried to the quagmire of the grave.” I am a natural person, not a politician. In nature, we need to be very careful of things that appear shrouded and moribund, lest we bury them too soon.
It is my experience in the world that many things that appear to have died will metamorphose into marvelous new maturity under favorable conditions. (Those who raise silkworms know this phenomenon first hand.) It is my tendency to dust off the shrouded, pitiful, useless lump of a thing and tickle it lightly from time to time to see if there is still a little “kick” left in it. I am not yet convinced the stable governments in the world have ceased to adapt and change. They seem to respond to occasional proddings. Only things that are unable to change from within have truly died. The thought of killing the silkworm chrysalis to obtain the valuable silk from the cocoon always makes me feel vaguely uneasy and sad. Observing all the bloody conflicts in the world today effects me the same way.
I would like to see marvelous new forms of government spontaneously evolve and stretch their wings without causing damage to the people who make up the nations. If people have enough time to change and restructure and realign themselves within the confines of the more stable governments of the world, during this dormant, stagnated period in the seasons of history, who knows??
In winter, everything looks dark and dreary. When “spring” returns, we may have government bodies that “fly” and sip nectar (rather than gobble all our greenbacks) and delight our souls. People who practice controlled lucid dreaming know frightening nightmares are attention getters. They serve as the most obvious clues to give notice we are in a dream. We know, as soon as we become aware “it is only a dream,” events being observed can be drastically changed, merely by taking thought. Contrasted with reality, “worst possible” future scenarios keenly bring home the fact the future always exists purely in our imaginations and the reality we eventually experience will be the product of our collective planning and the results of our individual actions.
Like any nightmares, the “worst-possible-nightmare-future” scenarios jolt us into noticing the difference between what is real and now, and what is still nothing more than various possible outcomes in a vast collection of still amendable, unresolved, possible futures.
People who practice controlled lucid dreaming know from experience they are able to turn bad dreams into friendly images. Those who are able to “make bad dreams go away” should be well equipped to make the frightening prospect of undesirable futures “go away” and to create an array of new and better possible futures for us to use as preferred goals.
The first step in this direction seems to be for as many people as possible to start thinking with their total minds and memories and to become as skilled at becoming “lucid” while awake as they are while asleep.
Contrary to what people may think, time spent thinking about dreams induces a very keen appreciation of the differences between reality and illusion. People probably still tell children to “stop your daydreaming,” as if it were a wasteful thing to do. The same people wouldn’t dream of interrupting an adult who is obviously deep in thought, especially in a job situation.
Additional Comments:
New notes added 6-30-11 @ 1:46 AM/PDT In terms of Peace Of Mind, Sense Of Identity, Hope For The Future all this dreamwork is focusing on the sense of identity category. As has happened each time I have worked with this dream, once again I was reluctant to use it when I came to the point of entering it into this new dream journal. However, fuzzyant, another member at this site has dreams posted that coaxed me into following through.
I know this has been very long. That's how it is.
