From time to time my friend Fritz would show up and demand that we go to sleep together. Being the completely dispassionate and sexless human being I knew him to be, I had no discomfort in obliging him.
One night I caught what he was up to. I caught him talking, whispering to me as I began to drift into sleep. He instructed me to focus on the bright spots that seemed to reside under my eye-lids. He said, "focus on the spot; stay with it, stay with it". As I lost my attention he would seem to know and say "go back to the spot and concentrate as if your life depends on it". As I did he would ask me about what I was seeing and then told me to use it as an enterance. To my surprise I found myself in a dream. I was drifting over small trees and he would urge me to bring myself down to the ground. As I did I would find that once I hit the ground I'd float again and begin my drift over the trees.
Fritz spent many nights teaching me to stay on the ground.
He was intent on teaching me about dreaming. He explained to me that dreaming is one of the most important things that I have at my disposal. He said that I should take the practice seriously. He said that I would have to use all my energy to maintain my lucidity. Fritz explained that most of the content; pretty much all of it, is "complete and utter horseshit". What is not horseshit, he explained, is the fact that I am dreaming and this context itself is the gateway to the discovery of other dream items that existed outside the realm of complete and utter horseshit.
Fritz trained me, over time, to find and seek out elements of the dream that had a grounding in reality. He said that these items are not items at all but energetic components of the dream. Like the awareness of dreaming, they are firmly grounded in Reality and not conceptual residue emanating from the greater reality of Reality itself.
"You are a lazy fuck", he said at one point as I was enjoying a dream. "You get caught up in your stupid fucking imagings of self importance and lose your focus on what I'm telling you to do".
The strange part was that at that point I realized that Fritz sounded exactly as he did in waking life; a sour and merciless prick. It occured to me that all the other times when he was instructing me in dreaming, he was a different person. He was patient and pleasant. He even showed a sense of humour at times. But not this time. "Never mind thinking about me you moron", he shouted. Stay with the chair, referring to an item in my dream that stood out on it's own. "Keep shifting your attention around the dream field to stabalize your mind", he demanded. My energy seemed to be waning. "Stay with me", he demanded. I focused on the various aspects of the dream and skirted to the chair every now and then. Then other aspects of the dream took on the same quality as the chair. The more nonsensical elements of the dream began to fade or rather, transmuted by themselves. They shifted from precarious obects to apparently real objects. Then they merged into each other in a brilliant field of confluence. Fritz disappeared and I was on my own now. An overwheming terror enveloped me and I was there alone; no Fritz, no me, and eventually, nothing, not even aloneness or even fear.
My recollection of anything after that point is not available, yet, I know, I experienced something inconceivable.
I slept for 12 hours and when I woke up I was felt sick and disoriented. I remained in in my flat for five days before I got back to anything close to a normal state of mind.
I felt angry and disillusioned. Fritz had led me to somewhere I should not have gone. I felt like he was a monster.
But then I knew, for better or worse, I would never be the same again. Whatever happened was irreversable. Fritz had managed to bring on something that I could never erase. But then I realized that it wasn't Fritz at all that did it, and neither was it me.
I was dreaming again.
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