This is Part 3 in the series, click here to go back to the start.
My lucid dreams became more and more frequent over the next few weeks. Aside from getting better at flying I was learning and expanding upon a range of abilities. I had progressed to walking through walls, shooting fireballs out of my hands and moving objects telepathically around a room. Additionally during my waking hours I found myself taking the world less seriously, I felt somehow protected from within and my confidence increased. I was as mindful in my day to day errands as I was mindful in my sleep. I felt compelled to ramp up my normal meditation practice, I was less distracted, more focused and the people around commented on the positive change in me. It seemed I had accidentally broken through to the essential magical idea that reality itself could be just as malleable as a dream if you tackled it with the right frame of mind. It just took a little bit more time and effort to effect the change. It seemed I was leading a double life, mild mannered record store employee by day, super powerful dream wizard by night. I felt like I’d discovered an entrance to another world, a place both infinitely vast yet contained; a realm of endless creativity.
Imagine that deep within us there is an operator sitting behind a control panel regulating human emotions, rewarding us with good feelings, warning us with the bad. Now imagine I’d happened upon this work-station unmanned, a sign reading ‘back in 15’, I sat behind the desk and after some trial and error figured out how to mainline bliss without the need for any external event or stimuli. There’s a switch for contentment, a dial for sense gratification and a big red button labeled orgasm. I’d bypassed the external circuits and gained direct access to any sensation one could desire and I wasn’t about to give this power up easily. In the distance I heard the approaching steps of the operator so I barricaded the door to get familiar with the pleasure switches.
Which brings us to the sex dreams. My guess is that flying and sex are up there with the most common acts attempted by lucid dreamers. It took me a little while to happen upon the latter but once I did it was a discovery that very nearly derailed the whole enterprise. The first time it occurred, I had gained my lucidity while standing in the town square of some vaguely European locale, at the centre stood a full size marble statue of a naked woman. I was staring from a distance when I noticed her blink, I approached very slowly and saw her eyes move ever so slightly. I climbed up on the base and touched her skin, she came alive as I touched her, wrapping her arms around my waist and kissing me behind my ear.
That was how I lost my lucid dream virginity and the pursuit of pleasure would only get freakier and more depraved as I continued to push the boundaries. It's a tale as old as time, statue love leads to mermaid orgies leads to zero gravity orgasms above the planet; escalation is inevitable with this kind of thing until you find yourself drowning in a sea of warm mouths somewhere on the border of ecstasy and nightmare.
As far as dream activities go, I put sex and flying in a similar category, they are both based in sense gratification and wish fulfillment, they are both fun but shallow and can have significant downsides within the lucid realm if pursued to excess. For me, flying and sex all too often resulted in either my waking up or getting lost in the action and forgetting that I'm dreaming, which was the last thing I wanted. The lucid state is a fragile one, difficult to maintain at the best of times, and if you've already waited a week or more between dreams, giving in to your base desires starts to feel like a step backwards or at the very least a waste of a turn. It's my thinking that your subconscious probably doesn't want you to be in a lucid dream state so it'll throw any and every colourful distraction your way to try to throw you off course so it can get back to doing it’s essential work. In retrospect it seems my attention was being purposefully redirected. This may have been an early indication that I was meddling in areas I didn’t belong.