The Talisman

Sometime after midnight on Wednesday morning, I had my first-ever lucid dreaming experience, and then later that morning my second. Each began with a cellphone that had been broken in half at its midpoint. The first dream began in a Disney warehouse. The second I can’t really recall at all.

Being given a tour of a Disney warehouse someone was using as an office, I’d stopped to use my phone to take pictures from interesting angles of a corridor formed entirely by stacks and stacks of printer paper. It was shortly after this that I pulled the phone from my back pocket and found it had been broken in half.

My thinking at the time, as I expressed to whoever was with me, was that I’d seen this happen before to my phone, but it was in a dream. Therefore, I must be dreaming. The first thing I did was I patted at my own body, and felt myself doing it. I realized that I’d never before felt my physical body when in a dream. I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced touch before in a dream at all.

The next thing I did was I began slowly to rise into the air.

I’ve flown in dreams before, although as far as I know not until the past few years. It’s rare, and I never fly like Superman. I remain upright, hovering at various distances from the ground. In this case, I began to wander around the warehouse and then the lucidity slowly started to slip from me. Not before, however, I wondered what other superpowers I might have, and decided that my left hand would have ice-projection powers, and demonstrated them. Then I decided that my right hand would have fire-projecting powers, and demonstrated them.

By this point, everything below me had turned into a cartoon, I suspect because whenever I think about lucid dreaming I think about Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. Control suddenly lost, anything else that happened escapes me now, and I simply woke up.

Later that morning, in a very brief dream about which I remember nothing else, I again found a cellphone that had been broken in two. Waking from this one, I thought about whether the broken cellphone had become something of a lucid dreaming talisman.

If I go to sleep thinking about that broken cellphone, will I get to lucid dream again?