Chicken Weather

My lucid dreaming project continues. That’s what I’m doing up at this ungoshly hour on a Sunday: per the experts, lucid dreams often result from waking up an hour or two early, staying up for a while, and going back to sleep.

So far, in the course of a month, I’ve had three lucid, or briefly lucid, or semi-lucid dreams.

LaBerge says (many of my sentences begin that way now) that it’s easier to notice anomalies that might inspire lucidity if you are mindful in your dreams. He writes that many people spontaneously develop the ability to be lucid in their dreams as a byproduct of meditation practice—being consciously attentive during the day makes it easier to see clearly while asleep. My meditation practice, alas, has not produced any such result. Could it be that I'm, ahem, not quite as mindful when I'm awake as I think I am? Surely not!

He says the three requirements for learning lucid dreaming are motivation, which I have; excellent dream recall, which I have; and “correct practice of effective techniques.” I’m doing that, aren’t I? Well, I’ll just have to keep at it. I have a lucid dreaming buddy online, and we are corresponding at great length about the matter.

The other night, I dreamed Frank Manahan came to visit me and I hugged him for so long that we started to lose our balance and he said, “Oh, dear lord,” just the way he would in real life, and then he said, “I’m reading this book on conscious dreaming. Interesting stuff!” I said to him, “Hey, me, too! Look!” and I showed him the lucid dreaming website up on my monitor at that very moment. All that without it ever crossing my mind that I was dreaming.

I still think living in San Francisco is making this more difficult, as waking life is decidedly stranger than my dreams. In a dream, I walk to the corner and mail a letter. Yawn. In real life, here comes a man wearing a dress made out of marbles and yelling, “Chicken weather! Chicken weather!” (Or is he saying “whether”?)

Using a string and a little piece of laminated cardboard with a hole punched in it, I've made myself a dream necklace that says "AM I DREAMING? (WHAT IF I WERE?)" It provides some text to use for state testing (which means I don’t have to get a tattoo).



I already wear my work badge on a string around my neck, and I basically wear my pajamas every day, so I don’t have to worry about looking like a dork—I’m afraid it's several decades too late for that.

Last weekend Tom and I had dinner at a Mexican place on Steuart St. with his friends Jeff and Rhonda, and then we all went to see In the Loop, a satire about the British government at the beginning of the Iraq war. It was quite witty. The bit that has stayed with me is where one man says in a sprightly tone that something or other is going to be “easy peasy lemon breezy.” The person he’s talking to says with a glare, “No. It won’t. It will be DIFFICULT DIFFICULT LEMON DIFFICULT.”

I recently asked a co-worker of mine if he's a griller; I confess that if he said he was, I was going to think, “Figures.” But instead, sorry to say, he told me that his wife has cancer, and while they did indeed used to grill all the time, once they found out from her doctors how unhealthy it is, particularly with lighter fluid, he not only got rid of their grill, he came straight home from the hospital and destroyed it in a rage. Very sad story.

Hammett is finally collared and tagged. I told him, “This is your ticket home,” when I put it on him, as a cat without a collar is very unlikely to be reunited with his mother if he accidentally ends up outside, perhaps due to a careless repairperson or earthquake or fire. Hammett has a chip, but there is no guarantee that whoever might find him in such a circumstance would think to have him scanned, or would have the means and willingness to do it, so it’s best to have both a chip and a collar.

I ended up getting him a breakaway collar—it should pull apart if it gets snagged on something and he’s dangling from it—from The Cozy Critter, one of their solid (“marble”) colors, and I got two tags from Boomerang Tags that lie along the collar itself instead of dangling down. One has Hammett’s name on it, his chip number and the phone number of the chip place (thus obviating the need for actual scanning of the chip), and the other has my name and phone number on it. (It wouldn’t all fit on one tag.)

He doesn’t seem to mind the collar too much. Actually, I think he kind of feels more important now, with his credentials there for all to see and admire.