(Continued from above)
The woman turned to the man and said, "He's coming around now. Pulse and heartbeat, grossly normal. Slightly high blood pressure. REM status,
normal..." and she rattled off a few other medical things like that. I felt strangely calm and alert, not frightened, like a student in a classroom
about to learn something new.
The man in front of me turned back toward the window and said, "Could we get some clothes on him?" There was a click and I noticed a little intercom
speaker set into the wall. One of the guys in the other room bent into a microphone and his voice came out of the intercom: "Affirmative. Initiate
jeans and T-shirt sequence." He fiddled with a dial and suddenly like a computer-graphic "morphing" sequence, I was no longer naked. A pair of
ordinary jeans and a white t-shirt were now covering my body!
The woman rattled off some more technical-sounding stuff. One thing I remember in particular was something like: "Anxiety suppression tuning working
extremely well. We should be able to stabilize the dream sequence for at least a few minutes of subjective time, and possibly as long as ten minutes."
I can only guess what this actually meant; but I did notice that (as mentioned earlier), I was calm and without anxiety, which was strange considering
I was obviously in some weird kind of experimental situation with scientists and I had just gone from being naked to fully clothed seemingly at the
turn of a dial. I remember thinking that I
should be feeling a lot more freaked out than I actually was, and how odd that seemed.
Then the woman looked up and smiled at me. "Hello. We are going to ask you a few questions. Is that OK with you?" I nodded. Then the man started
asking questions, and each time I answered, the woman ticked off something on her tablet computer with a stylus.
Examples of the questions that I remember: "Do you know your name? What is your name? Excellent. What year is it? Who is the president? What did you
have for dinner last night? Good, good. Are you awake or asleep? Do you feel anything unusual? Can you raise your right arm for us? Excellent, you are
doing very well. How many fingers am I holding up?" It went on for a while, and then they thanked me.
Then the man said, "Now we are going to show you some scenes, and I want you to describe them." Suddenly little miniature 3D tableaux were forming in
the air right in front of my eyes, out of nowhere, like holographic projections in a sci-fi movie, only very sharp and clear, full of realistic
colors. First there were shapes, like rotating cubes, pyramids, etc. Then an automobile, a scene that looked like a big tree next to a farmhouse and
barn, a hot-air balloon, a dog, and a few other mundane things like that.
The last thing they showed me was a miniature chessboard hovering in space before my eyes. The pieces were all alligned like at the beginning of a
game. "Do you know how to play chess?" the woman asked. I shook my head (I don't know, actually). She smiled and said, "That's OK. Just see if you can
move one of the pieces. Any one. It really doesn't matter. Just pick it up from one square and put it down on another." I reached out my hand and it
went through the board like it was going through smoke. "No, no," said the man gently. "Try to move it with your
mind. Just by thinking about
it." I concentrated and strained myself a little, but nothing happend.
The woman looked back at the room and said something like, "Dr. Royce, could you boost the q-form wave amplitude by zero-point-two percent?" (Those
were not her exact words, but they were something similar.)
Suddenly everything got super-sharp and clear, but in a slightly unpleasant way. The only thing I can compare it to is putting on a pair of powerful
glasses that are not your own, so your eyes are strained a little but all sorts of details stand out. I remember looking at the tiny hairs on my wrist
and marveling that I could see each one with perfect clarity, as well as the minute shadows of them that the halogen light overhead was making.
"We are losing attentiveness; I'm going to drop the crest a little," said the tinny voice from the intercom. Nothing really changed, though. I was
still seeing every crumb and mote of dust in super-high focus. Then the woman said, "Try it again. Try to move one of the chess pieces. You don't have
to strain, just gently think it up and down using your natural mental willpower." I tried, but still it didn't work. "Negative on intentionally trial
43-b," said the man in a bored, clinical tone of voice. "Well, that's OK, don't worry yourself about it," said the woman to me. "It is OK that you
couldn't move any of the pieces. Don't be upset, you did a wonderful job tonight."
The chess board suddenly vanished, and the focus and "crispness" of my general perception dropped a bit. I suddenly felt very tired, and the dream
started to "fuzz out" and become less lucid. It was becoming more "cartoonish" and dreamlike, less distinct, less like real life. "He's breaking up on
us," said the voice from the intercom. "That's OK," said the woman in the room with me. "He lasted a lot longer than I expected." She sounded pleased,
as if things had gone well. "He might remember this when he wakes," said the voice from the intercom, a bit doubtfully. "I boosted that q-crest pretty
high." The woman answered, "No, he won't remember jack. He might have a nasty headache when he wakes up, though." That was the last thing I remember;
the dream broke up and then I was sitting up in my bed here at home, covered in sweat and breathing heavily.
She was wrong about remembering, as you can see from this post. She was right about the headache, though. It feels like a hangover, although I didn't
have anything to drink yesterday.
I wanted to write this all down quickly and get it out before I forget -- I've read that is what you are supposed to do with important dreams. And so
I have.
My mind is a whirlwind of a million questions, but right now all I want to do is take a few aspirins and crawl back into bed. I have to go to work
tomorrow, after all. I'll check this thread later.
edit on 10-3-2014 by Indigo Starchild because: (no reason given)