I dreamed I woke up

I dreamed I woke up.

In this waking life my thoughts

are agate points and deep lagoons

that make ancient cities and heroes

and bust dakinis out of lunch boxes.

Everything is alive when I am awake.

I remember to swim in air

and fly in water, and ride moon-tigers

to the Moon Cafe, and the light in my head

is the light of the blue-white star.

I went back to sleep in a world

of fewer voices and more noise. Out here

in mossy woods, sleep life is pleasant.

It's good to watch a cedar shake her frills,

good to be surprised by lime on watermelon.

There are days I don't want to wake up.

Then there are days of pain and lost delight,

city days caught in time and trivial stories

when I forget that I am asleep

and can change the game if I awaken.

I cannot say whether the person writing this

is asleep in the world, or awake in the dream


Art: "Autoscopy" by Robert Moss

This poem is published in Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press.

Serial awakenings and the power of an 8 oz bottle of beer

 

The last flight of steps down from my top floor apartment would normally scare me. The wooden slats bounce underfoot and seem to be suspended in midair.There is no railing. However,I bounce down happily enough into a large atrium restaurant.
     I have been told they have 8 ounce bottles of beer here that are really powerful. I order one, and a plate of small sausages. I take my seat at a table in the middle of the space, where a server brings me my order. I have been typing my dreams on my phone, as is my custom. There were many active scenes, and I am glad I managed to catch them.
     The beer and sausages are delicious, though each was barely a nip. I think I'll repeat my order. At this moment, I realize I did not write my dreams where I will be able to find them when I go back to my bed. I am now quite lucid. I realize that I came out of some inner dream experience into this outer court - appropriately, it's rather like a food court - and that if I want to save anything before the bouncy steps and the punchy little bottle of beer, I had better get on it.
     I sit up in bed and grab my phone, postponing my bathroom visit. While typing a report in bed, I am still at the table in the dream restaurant. Carefully, I retrace my steps, up the bouncy ones, and then up regular stone or cement staircases to the apartment.
     What was I doing in this apartment, unknown to me in the ordinary world? The last thing I did before leaving was to arrange three divination decks - one at least was a tarot deck - I had designed and drawn atop a waist-high bookcase. I reached through a gauzy curtain to pull down a tall window behind the bookcase in case of rain 
      I remember vaguely doing test readings with my cards with other people,and exploring the city beyond this building. But for now,I am content to go forward with the story that will bring me to the 8 ounce bottle. I open the door of the apartment.It is dark on the landing. I hear a neighbor moving about. "I'm new here," I call. "Do you know where the light is?" She laughs. She doesn't. 
      I go back down the stairs. They are well lit by the time I get down to the bouncy steps. I recall I was going t get something to eat at a restaurant outside this complex, but was diverted by the 8 ounce beers.
      Now I recall a little of the city I started exploring in earlier scenes. The streets are full of amazingly decayed and ruined houses. Their pictures would make a marvelous book. Clearly a general disaster overtook the city - war or plague or inundation- yet each house has been ruined in its own way, and carries its own story. Formerly elegant townhouses are solitary islands among the rubble of buildings that fell around them. A once grand palazzo wears the face of a ruined duchess. I will come here again. But first I must finish this report.

The so-called false awakening is a common phenomenon. For many prolific dreamers, it involves the experience of writing something in your journal (or in my case on the phone) only to wake up to find that you were still dreaming when you did that. I would not call my experience from the early hours today a false awakening. Rather, it is as example of serial awakening.
     In a dream I become aware that I was dreaming when I recorded a dream report. I am now able to sustain awareness in both realities, typing my report with my physical fingers while still in the dream restaurant with my beer and sausages. At the same time, I am able to project myself back into earlier scenes in the dream sequence: to laying out the card decks and exploring the ruined city. I am missing a great deal, but I have leads for reentry expeditions..
     I am tickled by the lucidity trigger. The notion of "powerful" 8 ounce bottles of beer was insistent. It came into my mind repeatedly, when I entered the dream restaurant and when I realized I was dreaming. Something to seize and hold. Reality check: I am unlikely to order a half pint of beer in any container. I see that 8 oz cans are available, both of suds I would never touch (like American Budweiser) and of some high-octane craft brews that do pack a punch,with 7 to 10 per cent alcohol content as opposed to the 5 percent average for American beers.
    Perhaps the symbolism of the little bottle is telling me that less may be more and that small portions may be potent. Certainly I enjoyed bringing back small portions of a very active night when my dream self was out and about in many places, and the prompt to float the expression serial awakening. I may need to eat some sausages soon to honor the dream. Their taste is still on my palate: slightly spicy, like merguez.  And no doubt there is beer in my future.

Drawing from RM dream journal, September 29.2020

Unwritten story

I wanted a story and I have one, a perfect miniature narrative recorded in my travel journal in what I hope will be legible writing, complete with title. I am pleased I have fulfilled two of the assignments I set for my writing class: to write at least one page of their journal and harvest at least one page of something sufficiently polished to be presented to the group. I have both, in a single journal report.
    I glance at my watch on the bedside table. 3:00 a.m. I am usually awake at this time. The hour between 3 and 4 in the morning is possibly my favorite in the daily cycle. The world is quiet, reality seems fluid and malleable. The veils to other realms are thinned. I go to the bathroom then pause at a window to look up at the stars. Perhaps I will put a blanket over my shoulders and go out on the porch to talk to them. But first I want to savor the story I brought back from my dreams.
    Funny, my travel journal is not where I set it down. It is still in the bag I have been carrying to my writing class. I don’t remember putting it away but I am glad to see that I made sure I would be ready to share with the class. Don’t trust a teacher who does not do his own assignments, and make sure he produces evidence of that!
    I open the journal to the page bookmarked by a red ribbon. I see a drawing of a tree with two trunks, one that I visited on a lunchtime walk the previous day. A silver birch, related to the paper birches that grow beside the evergreens in the wood near my home. They provided a medium for the sacred stories of the First Peoples of that country, maps with pictographs of the soul’s journey and its interaction with the spirits of animals and ancestors and greater powers. The twin trunks of the tree I met yesterday rise towards the sky like the legs of a diver who has plunged into the earth. There is the impression  that the tree is rooted in heaven, like the Tree of Life of the Kabbalists and the tree bridge to the World Up Top of the Aboriginal spirit men. The gap between the trunks is surely a portal. I stepped through it, in my imagination, when I drummed for a journey the previous day.
    But this is yesterday’s story. I turn the page. The next page in my journal is blank. This is not so unusual. I often leave a page empty to receive later musings and sketches and notes on what follows a dream or vision. I leaf forward. The next page is blank, and the next. There is nothing in my journal after the sketch of the birch tree with two trunks.
    Perhaps I was confused, and actually wrote my story in the workaday notebook I carry as well as my beautifully bound journal. No, it’s not there. Or maybe I roused myself to do what I must always do at some point: to enter report on a digital data base, on the small screen of my mobile phone or the petite screen of my laptop. I fire up both. I check and recheck. There is no entry from the night.
    I wrote a story but left it in another reality, in an outer courtyard of dreaming around the inner courtyard where a dream adventure gave me the narrative. I fulfilled my intention to write from a dream after a false awakening, in a world that was not my current physical reality.
     Can I step back into that world, and bring back the missing story?
     I lie in bed, on my back, willing myself back in the dream where I wrote in my journal. My inner screen comes on but it shows me random things: patterns and odd objects and unfamiliar faces. Nothing solid.
     Can I at least bring back the title of my story?
     It comes at once.
     I close my eyes, then open them to make sure I wrote the words this time in a place where I can hold on to them. Yes, I have my title.
     Unwritten Story.

False awakenings and real dreams

Have you experienced a false awakening? You wake from a dream, perhaps to write the dream down - and then wake again, to find there is nothing in your journal because you were writing in another dream. In the lucid dreaming literature, false awakenings are often called "pre-lucid" experiences, with the implication that they may be failed lucid dreams because the dreamer failed to become aware that he or she was dreaming. There are bigger things going on. In dreams, we awaken to other orders of reality. When we wake up in our regular bodies, we may have fallen asleep in another world. Sometimes, lying in the drifty state near sleep, I sense that as I grow drowsy, a second self, back to back with me on the bed, is stirring awake, ready to prowl. I'm intrigued by nights in which we slip from one dream into another, as if moving from an outer to an inner courtyard. Sometimes the shift is marked by the experience of falling asleep in one dream and waking up inside another. Or, coming back from an inner dream, we awaken inside an outer dream. When we mistake the outer dream for external reality, we talk of a "false awakening". In one of the big, life-changing dream adventures of my life, I woke from a dream in which a sea eagle, an aquatic raptor native to northern Australia, my native country, and to northern Scotland, the country of my paternal ancestors, flew me across an ocean to a profound experience of contact with Aboriginal elders and their Dreamings. In high excitement, I proceeded to recount the dream to a gathering of dream researchers at a conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams (as it was then called). I noticed, as I spoke, that the lecture theater we were in was too formal and structured for my taste, with desks bolted to the floor in steep banks. I did not notice, until I woke again in my body in the bed, that I was still dreaming. There was a double follow-up to that dream sequence. First, I checked with the ASD on the venue for a presentation I was to make at a forthcoming conference and found that I had been assigned a lecture theater very similar to the one in the outer dream; thanks to my dream advisory, I was able to have the venue changed to a more informal space more suited to dream experiencers. Second, on a visit to Australia I had not planned at the time of the dream, I found myself in contact with Aboriginal elders who confirmed things I had seen in the inner dream, and opened sacred space to me because I came to them with the right dream. Experiences of this kind can awaken us to the important fact that there are many levels of dreaming. As we develop the practices of Active Dreaming, including the ability to embark on conscious dream travels and to attain and maintain lucidity during our nocturnal excursions, we will learn that we can go with intention to successive levels of dreaming. Our design then becomes to bring back more from the innermost dreams, where the greatest treasures are to be found, but may be lost to memory as our dream selves wend their way back to the surface. In a program I led for sixth-graders, we were all seized with admiration for a lovely young girl who narrated a night in which she passed through seven successive dreams, nested inside each other, until she found herself in an epic of love and danger in the time of the American Revolution -and then traveled back, level by level, through the outer courts of dreaming, with exact and vivid memories of the whole adventure.

Part of our practice, as active dream travelers, is to learn to recognize personal markers that we are moving from one level of dreaming to another. Some dreamers have familiar places of transit; favorites include a locker room (a place of changing, when we think about it), a bathroom, an Eastern restaurant, grandma's house. Some of us have the frequent experience of going up or down successive levels in a building with many floors, or an elevator that works rather differently from a regular lift. Shifts from color to black and white and back again may denote transits between different levels of dreaming as well as different locales. Taking off or putting on clothes, or changing vehicles, may be another marker of switching levels. To get to higher levels, we may need to move beyond the astral body (in which we engage in many of our dream adventures) to a more subtle vehicle.    When you monitor jumps from one dream scene to another and get into the habit of asking "How did I get here?" in the dream as well as after it, you are on your way to becoming a traveler who can move fluidly from one level of dreaming to another. 
Back to the issue of the "false awakening", in which we wake from a dream only to find - when we wake again in the physical body - that we were still dreaming. In an evening in a class, I suggested that although I could not prove whether or not I was dreaming at that moment, I might be able to establish whether I was in a physical body. To dramatize this point, I took the candle from the center of the circle and dribbled hot wax onto the web between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand. As I felt the pain, I announced to the group, "I think I have established that whether or not I am dreaming, I am in a physical body right now." Then I woke up in my bed. I felt the residue of the heat and pain in my left hand, a dream hangover effect that is sometimes called astral repercussion. Growing consciousness and discernment about these things is a matter of practice, practice, practice. The reward is to become a more conscious citizen of the multiverse, awake to the fact that our ordinary lives are related to grander stories being played out, right now, in other orders of reality, able to draw from this the will to choose how we navigate life on all levels.

A nod to neuroscience: Like lucid dreams and vivid dreams in general, false awakenings seem to be most common in the early morning. Those who link states of consciousness to brain functioning would note that this is when there is an increase in subcortical activity associated with the circadian cycle.

Art: Salvador Dali, Figura asomada a la ventana (1925). Beyond the girl is the bay of Cadaqués in Catalonia, where Dali summered. Garcia Lorca, who also stayed here, said that life in Cadaqués was like a dream.

Seeking the innermost dream

I am intrigued by nights in which we slip from one dream into another, as if moving from an outer to an inner courtyard. Sometimes the shift is marked by the experience of falling asleep and waking up inside the dream state. Waking from an inner dream, not yet fully aware that we are still in outer dream (but not yet in the outermost dream of physical reality) we record or talk about what we just experienced in that deeper place. 

     In one of the big, life-changing dream adventures of my life, I woke from a dream in which a sea eagle, an aquatic raptor native to northern Australia, my native country, and to northern Scotland, the country of my paternal ancestors, flew me across an ocean to a profound experience of contact with Aboriginal elders and their Dreaming.
      In high excitement, I proceeded to recount the dream to a gathering of dream researchers at a conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. I noticed, as I spoke, that the lecture theater we were in was too formal and structured for my taste, with desks bolted to the floor in steep banks. I did not notice, until I woke again in my body in the bed, that I was still dreaming.

     There was a double follow-up to that dream sequence. First, I checked with the IASD on the venue for a presentation I was to make at a forthcoming conference and found that I had been assigned a lecture theater very similar to the one in the outer dream; thanks to my dream advisory, I was able to have the venue changed to a more informal space more suited to dream experiencers. Second, on a visit to Australia I had not planned at the time of the dream, I found myself in contact with Aboriginal elders who confirmed things I had seen in the inner dream, and opened sacred space to me because I came to them with the right dream.

     Experiences of this kind can awaken us to the important fact that there are many levels of dreaming. As we develop the practices of Active Dreaming, including the ability to embark on conscious dream travels and to attain and maintain lucidity during our nocturnal excursions, we will learn that we can go with intention to successive levels of dreaming. Our design then becomes to bring back more from the innermost dreams, where the greatest treasures are to be found, but may be lost to memory as our dream selves wend their way back to the surface.
    In a program I led for sixth-graders, we were all seized with admiration for a lovely young girl who narrated a night in which she passed through seven successive dreams, nested inside each other, until she found herself in an epic of love and danger in the time of the American Revolution - and then traveled back, level by level, through the outer courts of dreaming, with exact and vivid memories of the whole adventure.

     Part of our practice, as active dream travelers, is to learn to recognize personal markers that we are moving from one level of dreaming to another. Some dreamers have familiar places of transit; favorites include a locker room (a place of changing, when we think about it), a bathroom, an Eastern restaurant, grandma's house. Some of us have the frequent experience of going up or down successive levels in a building with many floors, or an elevator that works rather differently from a regular lift.
     Shifts from color to black and white and back again may denote transits between different levels of dreaming as well as different locales. Taking off or putting on clothes, or changing vehicles, may be another marker of switching levels. To get to higher levels, we may need to move beyond the astral body (in which we engage in many of our dream adventures) to a more subtle vehicle.

     The problem of the "false awakening", in which we wake from a dream only to find - when we wake again in the physical body - is an intriguing one. I explored it one evening in a class in which I suggested that although I could not prove whether or not I was dreaming at that moment, I might be able to establish whether I was in a physical body.
     To dramatize this point, I took the candle from the center of the circle and dribbled hot wax onto the web between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand. As I felt the pain, I announced to the group, "I think I have established that whether or not I am dreaming, I am in a physical body right now." Then I woke up in my bed. I felt the residue of the heat and pain in my left hand, a dream hangover effect that is sometimes called astral repercussion.

     Growing consciousness and discernment about these things is a matter of practice, practice, practice. The reward is to become a more conscious citizen of the multiverse, awake to the fact that our ordinary lives are related to grander stories being played out, right now, in other orders of reality, able to draw from this the will to choose how we navigate life on all levels.

For more on the levels of dreaming and the subtle bodies, please see my book Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death (New World Library).

Art: René Magritte, "The Human Condition II" (1935)

Following one of my characters to Sintra

In writing fiction, you know that it's working when characters come alive and start creating their own plots. This happened with my historical novel Fire Along the Sky (published in the U.K. as The King's Irishman). Once I found the voice of my narrator Shane Hardacre, an Anglo-Irish dramatist and rakehell who is a fictional kinsman of Sir William Johnson, he ran away with the story, all the way down the Mississippi to New Orleans.
     For the second, expanded edition of the novel, I interleaved correspondence between Shane and Valerie D'Arcy, a worldly-wise and deeply intuitive lover from his later life between the chapters of his narrative of a time of war and intrigue on America's eighteenth century frontier. Their love letters are filled with dreams. "Dearest Shane," Lady Valerie opens her first letter, on the first page of the second edition, "I dream you as the leopard. Last night you came to me in his skin...As I write this, I feel the places in my body you praised and fed."
    I again had the experience of my characters taking over, driving things in their chosen directions. Valerie D'Arcy is very hard to resist!
   More recently, I have noticed a parallel and even more intriguing phenomenon: that when a fictional character comes fully alive, he or she may have an independent existence outside the pages of a book. They may even cast something of a spell over their creators.
    Last week, I found myself traveling into a possible future, maybe five years from now. To my slight surprise, I saw my possible future self seated under an orange tree on a hill in Sintra, the old royal capital of Portugal, close to Lisbon. He had a sweeping view of the towers and red tile roofs of the town, and to the sea. He was immaculately dressed in a white linen suit (not too rumpled), a very broad brimmed summer hat, and he looked fairly fit and lean. The glass beside him is porto branco (dry white port). He is writing with a fountain pen, signing books and making notes in a leather-bound journal. I don't know all the circumstances of his life but I know that he is now beloved for his stories, which are reaching children as well as adults. I rather like him!
    As I sketched the scene around the orange tree, I remembered that back in the mid-1990s, when I was writing the love letters between Shane and Lady Valerie, I decided to give Shane a villa in Sintra, the old royal capital of Portugal, as his place of retirement. Was my character now drawing me to the same place?
    I pulled the new edition of Fire Along the Sky off my shelves just now and found this

letter from Valerie, dated 15th January, 1805:  

My dear Shane,

What does it mean, to wake from your dream and discover you are still dreaming? This happened to me last night, not once, but six or seven times. I was with you, my skin a web of nerve endings, as we lay together. You were gentle and knowing, serving my time and rhythms...
    Then I realized our position was impossible. You were a young buck, not twenty years old, the hair on your face still a fine, silky down...At that moment, I awoke, knowing myself deceived by a dream. I never knew the pleasure of entertaining you between bedsheets until you had kissed good-bye to sixty summers...
    Then I saw you across the room, writing at my secretary by candlelight. Scratch, scratch....I was so glad to have you with me...I flung myself on your neck, kissing and stroking.
    Then I realized I was only dreaming again, with Sir Henry snoring at my elbow in the bed.
     And woke in the thickest woods I ever saw. I thought I was in the oak forests of the Dordogne, on a summer jaunt, and marveled that I had dreamed myself back in bed with Henry. Then I entered a clearing and saw my mistake. A cruel warbird shot down at my head from the sky, in a blur of tawny feathers. He sank his talons into my hair...I thought I was fighting for my life. Yet I did not want to harm this bird because he was somehow connected with you.
    With that thought, I woke from this fierce struggle. I found myself, to my great relief, back with you...I told you my dream of the warbird, and my feeling that there was a message here of the most urgent nature...
     Then I remembered: This cannot be. You are in Sintra, dipping your sweet face in the inhalations - or exhalations - of some Portuguese maid...

     Dreams within dreams, nested like those dreadful Russian matriosha dolls. I blame you for this giddying night, Shane. Will you explain to me what is happening?
     Can you assure me I am not dreaming, as I write these lines?

In dreams,
Valerie

Shane writes back, from Sintra:

Dearest Valerie

I cannot help you with your question about dreaming and waking.
   I have heard that the swamis of India say this life is a dream from which we wake up when we die. That would make birth the first of our false awakenings, if that makes any sense at all.

Your own
Shane

When fictional characters come alive, they not only take over the plot. Jumping outside the book, they may seek to draw their creators into their own plots. I gave a character in one of my historical novels a home in Sintra, and now it seems he is drawing me there.

  

I dreamed I woke up

I dreamed I woke up.
In this waking life my thoughts
are agate points and deep lagoons
that make ancient cities and heroes
and bust dakinis out of lunch boxes.

Everything is alive when I am awake.
I remember to swim in air
and fly in water, and ride moon-tigers
to the Moon Cafe, and the light in my head
is the light of the blue-white star.

- from my poem "I Dreamed I Woke Up" in my collection Here, Everything is Dreaming.

Are we asleep in regular life and awake in the dream world? Sometimes it feels like that, and I play with the fluctuations in our sense of reality in “I Dreamed I Woke Up”.
     When I close my eyes, I often have the sense of waking in another landscape, among people who may have been waiting for me. Then there is that phenomenon of “false awakening”. Within a dream, you sleep and wake up, to find later that you were in another level of the dream, not yet back in the body in the bed. Such experiences mark transits from outer to inner courtyards of dreaming, and when we learn to recognize what is going on, this deepens our practice of conscious dreaming.

"Return from Earth Mountain". Oil crayons. (c) Robert Moss

Telling a dream inside a dream

I love the wild beach. Water, wind and light stream together. This calls for Turner's brush. I run in and out of the water with two lovely younger women who have trained with me.
    I feel myself being gently pulled out of the dream, but I want to stay with it, enjoying its energy and trying to hold every detail: the island across the waves, the buildings on the rise above the sand dunes, the palms swaying in the wind. Is this the beach in Brazil where I'll be leading a workshop later this month? It is very like it.
    I let the scene go and proceed to describe it to the women who were with me in the dream. One of them needs some counsel for a friend who is going through a painful life passage. The other wants to explore some marketing ideas we began to discuss in the beach dream.
    I stretch, and open my eyes, and sit up in bed. I am now in a spacious, pleasant room where more than a dozen happy people are gathered around the walls. They seem to have been waiting for me to wake up. They are all students of mine, and all but two are women. I joke that it is my good fortune in life to go everywhere surrounded by beautiful women. We are in the midst of a retreat I am leading. Our laughter is interrupted by a matronly figure, the manager of the place, who comes through a door to my right I had not noticed before to remind us that checkout time is 12 noon.
    Oh, very well. I go out through the door she used to get my stuff together. I go outside the house, and now seem to be in a different country. I overhear part of the conversation of friends 
in that country and get a picture of a certain situation that may be useful. I leave them to it and go back inside the house. Funny, I can't seem to return to my room the way that I left it. The layout of this house is rather unusual. When I stepped outside, I was in another country. When I go back in, I am not where I was before.

I rose from this dream this morning, in my regular bed, in excellent spirits. I amused myself by counting the number of dream scenes that opened from each other here. There was (1) the scene on the wild beach (2) the scene where I am discussing this with the two women who were with me on the beach; (3) the bedroom with the party crowd; and (4) the outside scene where I listen to the conversation of people from yet another country, apparently in that country.
    I smiled at a very familiar motif. Remembering a dream inside a dream is a common experience for me. So is telling a dream inside another dream. This sometimes triggers dream lucidity in the narrow sense of becoming aware that you are dreaming inside a dream. Sometimes it brings the ability to navigate and draw knowledge from multiple realities in whatever state of reality and consciousness we happen to be in.
    Back in 1994, I dreamed that a sea eagle was wrestling with me on a beach for possession of the Australian hat I used to wear in those days. The struggle felt altogether physical. I reported the dream to a large audience in an auditorium at a conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams (ASD). Then I woke up in my bed, several months before that conference took place. The tussle with the sea eagle helped to prepare me for a very important life transition that was going to require my return to Australia. The scene where I told the dream, within a second dream, had more than entertainment value (though I never underrate that).
     When I recorded the dream, I noted that I was speaking in an auditorium with chairs bolted to the floor in tilted rows under sterile lightning. This was quite the wrong environment for the workshop I had agreed to lead at the ASD conference, in which I planned to have people choose partners and journey together with the aid shamanic drumming. I called one of the ASD organizers and learned than the scheduled location for my workshop was identical to the auditorium in my dream. It was now time to tell the dream in which I was telling a dream to someone in the dream of waking life. By doing that, I was able to have my workshop venue changed to a dreamier space.

I opened an old journal at random to find another example of telling a dream inside a dream. I immediately came upon this report, recorded on November 17, 1995:

I am being piloted by an elderly professor in a small seaplane over a mountain range. As we dip low, over the reddish peaks, I remark that this reminds me of a dream in which I was flying in a similar plane over a cordillera, and how this kind of plane has always appealed to my sense of romance and adventure. We swoop low over a body of water. The sensations of flight and movement are wonderfully vivid. “This is like a dream!” I exclaim in delight.
    It's like a dream because it is a dream. Like life.

To go through a succession of dreams-within-dreams may be to transit multiple levels of reality. It may be the innermost dream, accessed through many courtyards of outer dreams, that corresponds to the deepest level of reality. We talk of "false awakenings" when we dream we woke up, only to find later that we were still asleep in the physical world. This was my condition in the room of the happy dreamers in scene (3) last night. But wait a bit. Am I sure - are you sure - that getting up today was not a false awakening? 

Image: Mystery Island seen from Praia Morro das Pedras (c) Robert Moss