Dream of: 09 March 1996 (3) "Almost Lucid"
As I was standing in the kitchen of the House in Patriot, I looked outside through the window and saw a strange sight. A bird had flown past and appeared to have landed on the roof of the house. What was strange was that the bird appeared to have had many different colors in it.
Even though I wasn't wearing any shoes and only had on my socks, and there was snow on the ground, I quickly opened the kitchen door, stepped outside and looked up at the roof of the House. There it was – the bird – sitting up on the top of the House. It was about the size of a pigeon, only not as ponderous as a pigeon. It seemed light and its feathers were wispy.
What was so striking were all the colors – there must have been a dozen. The colors weren't all mixed together, but arranged in stripes, each stripe perhaps a centimeter or more thick. I thought it would be a good idea to try to memorize the order of the colors. Beginning at the tail, I saw that the colors were yellow, green, orange, red .... But before I could finish, the bird flew. I tried to follow it with my eyes but it was quickly out of sight.
I stood there perplexed, thinking that something just didn't seem right. Where had the bird come from? In a way it hadn't even seemed real. And then a thought struck me: perhaps I was dreaming. I looked all around me for some clue. I could clearly see the snow-covered trees beyond the garden, as well as the hills beyond. Everything was so clear and so detailed, not like a dream; I realized with certainty that this couldn't possibly be a dream. What was amazing to me was that I could have even been so confused as to have thought I was dreaming. I thought I needed to be careful with that, since I knew I wrote my dreams, and I didn't want to get the dreams confused with reality and start writing about real events, thinking they were dreams. But at least I didn't have to worry about what was presently happening, because I knew I was definitely awake.
I headed back toward the kitchen door, still looking in all directions for the bird. For a moment I thought I saw it in a tree on the other side of the street, but then realized it was just a piece of paper in the tree.
As I walked, I realized the House had somehow changed from the way I remembered it. It was set farther back from the road than before, and in fact appeared to be inside a spacious cow-
pasture surrounded by a wire fence. I thought I needed to be careful – there might be some cow manure under the snow, and I didn't want to step in any, especially since I was only wearing my socks.