animate, inanimate, and rice pudding, by Jennifer
The entire night after I took the Dreamtime Somalixir felt like a dreamtime carnival. I woke rested, but with the sense that I’d traveled far and had days of adventure.
Early in the night, I received a lesson on the basic nature of the world. Everything can be divided into two categories, I was instructed: inanimate things (like rocks) and animate things, divided into three sub categories, the first of which was black birds. The dream gave me no information about the other categories.
Throughout the rest of the night, I kept dreaming further details about how to understand the inanimate things. The details appeared as lessons but without a teacher. I was simply made to understand things, with the assistance of illustrations and facts. The way to measure inanimate things, I learned, was to displace them in water. There was also a diagram of a mountain that kept reappearing in subsequent dreams, each time with different sections in detail or dotted line with information that told me some new thing: its age, varying degrees of slope, kinds of rock in each strata.
I must have had at least a dozen dreams that night. The weirdest thing, though, was that I kept thinking I was awake then I would start to think about something and the thought would expand out into a dream. Early in the morning, I had woken up, or so I thought, and as I laid in bed I remembered the rice pudding we’d seen on a menu that day but hadn’t ordered. Then there was a spoonful of rice pudding and it began to glow and vibrate, and, finally, to emanate the nature of rice pudding-ness out into the universe. Several other times throughout the night, I remembered that first dream and wondered about the birds, then the waking thought became a dream. One time, birds filled the bedroom, squawking loudly so I feared they’d wake Erik up. Another time, my mind followed a bird from my mind out the window and into the sky.
The Dreamtime Somalixir is supposed to be useful for promoting lucid dreams. Its effect on me was similar but slightly different: instead of causing me to become conscious in my dreams, it brought my conscious mind to fore such that I thought I was awake until some strange occurrence made me realize I was dreaming.