It is time to start my usual weekend Phase practice. It is 11pm, the alarm clock is set to ring at 7am, the task list includes seeing my retirement home and swimming as a dolphin, and here I come!
I require more sleep these days; that’s why I set my alarm to ring in 8 hours. This way I get a decent amount of sleep and Phase practice at the same time. The only hard thing is to get back to sleep. The trick is to lay down, close your eyes, relax, start breathing with your sleepy breath, then start counting your breaths, then concentrate on breathing so that counting is no longer needed trying not to have any thoughts. It stops the internal dialog and in combination with a sleepy breathing, leads to easy dozing. I actually feel as if I am falling into the dark.
Then I had a long period of vivid dreaming so real that it seemed to be a mix of reality and dreaming. At some point, I was walking up the dark stairs in my old apartment building. Someone was following me. I got inside and tried to close the door behind me but some dark creature prevented me. It was very scary but instead of being scared, I realized it was the Phase, opened the door and stepped out toward the monster. Waving made it disappear. By the way, the statistics say that a lot of people start realizing they are dreaming within a dream when they have regular nightmares. I rarely dream about something scary, so this one was an easy trigger.
The first thing you do in the Phase is deepen. It is hard to look at something in the dark, so I am diving down through the stairs and get out of the building, but to my surprise, it is dark outside. It is night time. There are people walking on the street but no one wants to talk to me. There are dogs who bark at me and want to bite requiring permanent attention. I keep looking at things closely to maintain the Phase.
Then I see a house and it looks like what I need to see. For some reason, I start digging through it”s wall to see what’s inside. It takes forever. I am taking bricks out one by one, maintaining the Phase constantly, so after a while it seems pointless and I decide to stop.
Then I try to imagine myself being a dolphin but in the dark, the only picture coming to mind is a huge storm with lightning and it is probably not pleasant for dolphins to be in this situation. Suddenly I realize that I need a lighter environment to continue. I see a lit Christmas tree on the street, I dive into it and end up being a dolphin in a light blue water of … a chlorine pool. I am a dolphin but apparently in captivity and my task is to carry kids across the pool. After doing this for a while, I feel that this is not what I had in mind. It is so hopeless and depressing that I abandon the Phase.
Even though I had to constantly maintain the Phase, it lasted very long. And leaving the Phase voluntarily instead of changing the situation was, of course, a mistake! But who wants to be a dolphin in captivity, right?