A lucid dream

I’ve just woken up from one of my pitifully few lucid dreams. One of my recurring dream themes is wandering about foreign cities looking for second-hand bookshops. Over the years I have evolved a number of different, recognisable cities I travel to. I don’t know their names, but they have a more or less consistent topography from dream to dream, with the same bookshops in the same places. I never seem to get around to buying any books in these dreams; it’s all about the atmosphere of the streets and the ambience inside the shops.

This morning I dreamt about two little shops lying side by side somewhere. One of them had a sign saying it was closed, which was pretty irritating since it was closed the last time too. (I ‘remembered’ being there recently, but the memory could just as well be fake.) The other shop was open, though, so I went in. Some people were blocking a door I wanted to go through, so I rather rudely shunted them aside, only to find a small, cramped office with the lights out. As the others were getting somewhat hostile I left the shop.

Standing on the pavement, I found that I had forgotten my shoes inside. (I never actually took my shoes off, but I there I was, barefoot all the same.) The feeling of the rough ground was very unpleasant – probably a memory of the times I’ve gone barefoot in real life, something I intensely dislike. Because of the hostile atmosphere I didn’t want to go back inside, but this is where the lucid dreaming kicked in. I thought, “Ah well, since I’m dreaming anyway, I can just dream some new shoes”. This was of course not expressed in so many words; it was merely a thoughtform. The interesting thing is that it took me a bit of effort to dream the new shoes. I had to ‘will’ them into existence, and it took some time. Also, the final products were strange, rubbery things that were somehow part of my legs – clearly a parallel to the accounts of aliens and little people whose hats, clothes or footwear seem to be part of their bodies. And then I woke up. Nils Erik Grande Oslo, Norway