Cities of the Plane

Several great cities have been built in one quadrant of a vast open landscape. This quadrant is to the bottom left of my perspective, as I look down on this scene from high above. I think this is southwest.
The cities are still growing. There is no sign of construction; they are simply swelling and popping out as mushrooms do overnight.

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There is a designing mind behind each of the cities. Their designers are engaged in fervent competition, working against a deadline. From my aerial perspective, the cities look very similar, except that their outlines make different geometrical designs. The buildings are of spare, modern design, with occasional neo-classical features, columns and pediments. The dominant color is mid-brown. The cities are very clean and new.

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I zoom in on a triangular plaza with a fountain that looks like it has just been turned on. The plaza appears to be empty, but when I ask, “Where are the people?” it suddenly fills with a busy crowd of people who seem to be on the way to work. In the window of a coffee shop, someone is looking at me. I see my own face, but it is not merely my reflection. It is a second self of me, seated at a booth. There is a woman with him who is gone from my life, in my present reality.

I try the Waggoner Banishing: “All thought forms must now disappear!” (*)

They are still there. She is unaware of me, looking down at them. I consider my own vantage point. I am hovering above the plaza, maybe fifty feet up. I am now disembodied. I try to picture myself from the outside; the most I can see is an almost imperceptible pulse of light. Did I have a body, in this conscious dream, before I told the thought forms to disappear? I think so.

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Interesting. The Waggoner Banishing did not remove my second self in the coffee shop, or his companion. But it may have erased the dream body in which my focus self thought it was traveling.

The city with the fountain, rising from a vast flat landscape varied only by occasional copses of trees, and the other cities, reminds me of the Midwest, of Iowa and Ohio. An appropriate setting for a test of the Waggoner Banishing, since Robert Waggoner hails from the Midwest.

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I am told – by an inner source I cannot identify – that the city-building contest has been concluded. The winner will be announced in something like the Guinness Book of Records. I wonder about the great empty spaces in the landscape. I am drawn to a long straight highway where a city is on the move. You could mistake this, from afar, for one of those double-wide trailers or a simple ranch home being carried on the flatbed of a big trailer truck. But this is indeed a whole city. It looks like one of the full-grown cities reduced to doll-house scale, or smaller. I have the impression that when it is set down at the chosen location, it will expand rapidly to become a city scaled to human proportions.

*The "Waggoner Banishing" is a reference to a method employed by Robert Waggoner in his recent book on Lucid Dreaming. In this report of a conscious dream experience I describe the paradoxical results of an experiment with this ploy. In an order of reality where thoughts are things, "thought forms" may be quite durable!

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The City: The illustration is by artist Steve Niner and available as a digital print from him. (See the note at the foot of "The Child's Other World").