I had put a lot of work into the book the day before, wrapping up a three-day session. My brain was still very tired, and would need more than the previous night’s sleep to recuperate. After working another hour from 8 to 9 am, I fell asleep. I woke up around dinnertime, ate, and was once again unable to resist falling asleep. After about another hour or two of sleep, I woke up motionlessly to partial conscious awareness after a vivid dream. I realized that my mind was clear and relaxed enough to try to enter lucid dreaming. Moreover, I had an intense desire to do so. I tried separating – and nothing. I began observing images. At first they were quite dull. I could make out a forest landscape somewhere in the distance. It quickly became more and more realistic, and seemed to be sucking me in. However, I didn’t feel like waiting for it to pull me in, and so I tried once again to roll out. I was only able to make several degrees of movement, and then I was stuck again. I returned to my body, and once again rushed to force myself to roll out. I was able to move significantly farther, but was still stuck. I returned again, and even more forcefully started rolling out, this time meeting no resistance.
I felt lucid dreaming to be fairly weak. Even deepening techniques hardly helped. I had no vision, and the sensations had less than 50% the stability of those of real life. I was nearly pulled back into my body. I tried palpation on the objects in my room with double effort, and meanwhile ran around in order to obtain more sensations. It took effort, but the situation started to stabilize. Once I could feel that I was stably in lucid dreaming, I put my hands to my eyes and aggressively tried to see through the darkness. Sight quickly came, and I could see the whole room no less vividly than in real life.
Since lucid dreaming still seemed unstable to me and destined to be short-lived, I decided to put aside my plan of action and instead practice skills that I had not used in a while. First, I went up to the wall and started to forcefully knock on it with my knuckles. I immediately felt sharp and unpleasant pain. I concentrated my attention, and the pain quickly subsided. I knocked even harder. There was no pain. I punched the wall several times with all my strength, breaking the surface of the drywall and leaving a dent. There was no pain at all.
I then looked at my slipper lying next to the bed, and tried to move it just by looking at it. After some hesitation, the slipper started to move a bit, though reluctantly. I noticed that the realism of the space around me sagged somewhat and everything seemed to fade a bit – afterwards, the slipper bent to my every will. I moved it across the floor and made it move through the air. I finally dashed it against the window, shattering it. A cold draft blew in. I then telekinetically flipped the bed over and installed it on the ceiling, all by staring at it. I then focused my attention on the light-bulb of the lamp, trying to turn it on by force of will. The light bulb flickered on, and then off. I increased the depth of lucid dreaming to a hyper-realistic state through peering and palpation, and then tried illuminating the light-bulb again. This proved to be more difficult. It didn’t particularly want to obey my will. But after a few seconds, it gently reddened, and then lit up.
I finished my lucid dreaming skills training session by concentrating on the bed, willing it to catch fire. It immediately started smoldering. Then, small tongues of fire erupted here and there. Within a few seconds, the whole bed was on fire, filling the room with a sulphuric smell and a lot of smoke.
Rubbing my hands together in order to deepen the state, I went up to the broken window, startled that lucid dreaming had lasted so long, as it had initially been so unstable. I decided to use the last moments of it to take off into outer-space in one of those ultrafast machines featured in the move "Star Wars". I focused my attention on the idea, closed my eyes in anticipation, and immediately felt myself moving. I gradually felt the sensation that I wasn’t standing, but sitting on and sinking into a comfortable chair that had just appeared. I now felt that I was dressed in some kind of spacesuit, and holding a pilot’s joystick in my gloved hands. As soon as I focused my attention on that tactile sensation and had already decided to bring back my sight, a horribly loud sound started blaring. A force of titanic proportions pulled me from the chair and cockpit that I was in, its safety restraints nearly tearing me apart. The shock forced my eyes open.
Fortunately, my eyes did not open to the physical world. But unfortunately, I saw that I was approaching a huge spaceship at high speed, with sparks flying about all around me. There was already nothing that I could do. After another second, there was nothing but darkness, and I was weightless. Vexed at the interruption of such an interesting adventure, I totally forgot to employ further techniques, and soon realized that I was lying in bed, and could feel daylight through my eyelids. I figured that it was time to get up and continue writing the book. Without attempting to get back into lucid dreaming, I went to the bathroom to wash up, meanwhile reflecting on what had happened. I looked in the mirror, and did not immediately realize what was happening: I had huge beer-belly. At first I was in shock, because I had devoted so much energy to getting rid of this "trophy" that I got from "bulking up" and heavy weight training. Taking the belly in my hands, I squeezed and rolled the layers of fat. I then realized that I had never had a belly like this before. And then came the epiphany – I was still in lucid dreaming! One can only imagine my relief …
