Chapter 3

My dreams that night were extremely weird, there was no rhyme or reason to them, they were just an impressive fluctuating kaleidoscope of colour with various symbols flashing into my consciousness.

The symbols were so strange yet oddly familiar to me, as it went on I realised that I could hear indistinct murmurs just at the edge of my ability to hear.

As I focused on the sounds it became clear that the murmurs were words in at least a dozen languages, as it went on I began to realise the words corresponded to the symbols and I understood the murmurs more and more.

I began to slowly realise that I was learning languages! I couldn't tell what languages they were but I knew that there were several being uploaded into my brain somehow.

The dream began to progress more and more and I started to realise that I was incredibly aware of my self when I was dreaming, and just as soon as I realised this the kaleidoscope of colour faded away into inky blackness with just the symbols flashing in front of me.

At this point I realised I actually wasn't aware in the usual sense, I was conscious of a void of blackness in which there were flashing symbols and the murmurs in various languages of to one side. It's impossible to describe the exact way I felt then as I realised I had no viewpoint in this dream but I was in fact seemingly omnipresent. I existed in all the blackness and I was aware of everything inside the darkness at the same time.

I quickly came to the conclusion that I was somehow seeing the inside of my mind and then I was very disappointed. My mind was amazingly empty. With a dash of humour I realised my sister would love that comment. Obviously I wasn't expecting anything amazing but I was hoping for something more than this. I began to cast about and see if there was anything else I had overlooked, figuratively speaking. To my disappointment there was nothing. Just inky blackness.

'Perhaps when asleep the mind is simply empty?' I thought. 'Or I just need to learn some proper magic before I can see all the proper workings of the mind?' As I pondered the subject I came to the conclusion that the second was correct. There was an entire school of magic devoted to the mind so surely it must be more than just blackness.

I decided to see if I could feel my body in any capacity. Unsure of exactly how to do this I just tried to imagine myself pushing upward and into my physical body. I was immediately met with resistance and the symbols got dimmer as I began to feel a cool breeze. I immediately stopped and the symbols resumed their previous rate of flashing and the murmurs started talking again, I hadn't even realised they had stopped until they started again.

Evidently what I had just tried to do was a way of just waking myself up and that might interfere with any processes going on in my mind or body at the moment. Instead I tried to perceive outside my mind, now this was much trickier than It sounds. First I had to become completely aware of the inside of my mind a rather tricky task as when I did so I couldn't just ignore the voices or symbols I had to instead let them wash over me as I felt the edges of my consciousness.

Eventually I succeeded in holding the state of mind I thought I would need and then began to slowly cast outwards and see what was out there. I got the feint impression of Kaleidoscopic lights much like the ones I had seen in my own mind before but they were far away and indistinct.

After several such attempts I gave it up and focused instead on another sense. Smell. I figured that people breathe through their nose at night and everyone must have woken up from a dream of bacon at some point only to find someone was cooking it in the morning. So people must be able to smell at night right?

At first I didn't get much but then something began to come through, first a trickle of smells; sweat, a musty cold damp smell and the smell of wood. Focusing more intently on the smells and where they were coming from I realised that my sense of smell was rapidly improving, I could smell the difference between the types of wood used for different pieces of furniture. Focusing more intently I tried to build a picture from the smells and almost instantly I got a fully formed 'picture of smells' if you like. The smell of cold stone covered in wallpaper paste clearly outlined my room while different sources of wood could be pinpointed in the room and I could even smell the crack under my door where the smell of clean air from the kitchen came through.

Pleased with my experiments in this this sense I withdrew my focus on that sense and then began to try and listen. Initially all I got was the murmurs of voices in several languages but then I realised that was because I expected to hear them, but they were only in my head! I focused instead on sounds from outside my head and again a rapidly improving feedback began to come through.

At first all I could hear was the soft regular thump thump of my own heart beat combined with the gentle in out of my breathing but again the sense began to rapidly improve and I began to hear a few other things, there was a steady gurgling noise which I pegged as water moving through the radiator in my room, there was the whir of a small fan which obviously came from my computer which I left on at all times, a small blowing noise was difficult to pin down until I remembered when I had smelt the crack under my door. Again I began to focus on where the sounds were coming from and tried to build a picture of sounds and found that I could clearly differentiate distance from each sound but that also I could tell what was near the sounds, the wood partitions in my desk were clearly outlined in my mind as the sound of the fan made small echoes against them while I began to get a picture of the stairs behind the door from the sound of the breeze coming down.

I decided then that I would try to combine this with my sense of smell and try to get a clearer picture, as I opened my mind to that sense again my 'mental picture' of my surroundings got much clearer and contrary to my expectations the two senses didn't interfere with each other but instead sat on top of each other quite well. It was almost like I could bits of the room in red from my sense of smell and bits in blue from hearing and someone had combined them, they didn't conflict they augmented each other often giving a clearer picture.