The science of wordless spellcasting

I'm Harry Potter. I wake up in my bed, in the bedroom of a pretty normal looking modern Muggle-style house. The opposite wall, across the room and parallel to my bed, had built-in bookshelves from the ceiling down to about 3 feet off the floor. Below each column of bookshelves were three drawers.

In the previous dream, just before I woke up, a friend of mine had used the spell "fermata" to close the front door of a house we were getting ready to go into. I decided to test the opposite spell, the spell for opening things, "abierto" (I have no idea if either of these are real spells in the Harry Potter universe). I point my wand at a drawer and speak, "abierto". I mess around with my pronunciation, at first rolling my "r", then switching to a British (RP) "r". Then I start stretching out the pronunciation slowly. That's when I notice something weird.

I decide to experiment. I point my wand at the drawer, thinking the word "abierto" in my head, while starting to say "aaaah" out loud. In anticipation, the drawer begins to open. I push it shut. Interesting. Now I point my wand, think the word "automatic", and start to say "aaaah" again. This time nothing happens. Iiiiinteresting. I test it a few more times, then rush downstairs to tell Hermione.

Downstairs in the house, there are a lot of other kids (presumably other students) milling around. I walk into the small kitchen, where Hermione is making herself breakfast alone. I excitedly tell her to guess what I found out. She says "Hmmm... could it have something to do with..." (I forget what she referred to, but it wasn't remotely related.) I shook my head, smiling. Then I explained to her what I had found out, with "aaah" and "abierto" versus "aaah" and "automatic". You didn't need to say the whole spell, you just had to be focused on the right spell and begin speaking the spell.

"Woww, cool!" said Hermione, meaning I had told her something she didn't already know. And I was happy that she was excited.

[Note: This has everything to do with me currently reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.]

Sophie B. Hawkins's woodland home

I visited Sophie B. Hawkins's woodland home with a couple other people. Her house was two stories, very open, seeming to be the hollowed-out upright trunk of a gigantic tree. Some music began playing, and for a second I thought it was her song "As I Lay Me Down", but it turned out to be her cover of "Oh What a Night" by The Four Seasons. It started out with her on vocals, and I started singing along immediately in my best falsetto. Her lyrics had changed the gender of the object ("you know I didn't even know his name"). However, when it got to "Oh I, I got a funny feeling", it sounded just like the Four Seasons version, and then it was clearly a male vocal when it got to "hypnotizing, mesmerizing me, she was everything I dreamed she'd be". So I guess this was a duet, or even a collaboration with the original band.

As the song was going, I was wandering the house. I noticed a piano right near the front door. Plenty of clutter on the first floor. Very woody. Open layout. Went upstairs, also pretty open. You could still look over and see downstairs from the edge near the stairs. I walked into a sizeable library/study with one very large polished wooden table in the middle and bookshelves all along the walls. Sophie and the other two had walked up another short flight of stairs (second floor was sort of split-level), but I could see them clearly, as the two rooms had only table-height walls on the sides that faced each other.

Then some song started playing which I assumed to be a Smashing Pumpkins song, judging from the style of the intro, but I was unable to confirm it because I woke up.

Lovesick at the beachside condo

Before that, a dream, which turned out to be a novel that I was reading (as commented on by Roy as the dream was wrapping up). The setting was probably a beachside city on the west coast, in the 70's or 80's. The exact background story is lost to me now, but basically, a lovesick blonde woman, probably in her thirties, had gone down to her balcony (the lower floor on a two-story flat, many floors above ground level) to contemplate jumping off.

Meanwhile, the guy she loves (seemed like some identification with my father) is coming to look for her. For whatever reason, he visits the next door neighbor first. As he's finally headed down to her, I fall out to Roy commenting on the novel that I'm reading. I catch a glimpse of the text and remember one of the syllables was "sou", and I'm pretty sure the whole thing was written in a toneless pinyin.

Lucid books without titles

Coming back from bathroom on 2nd floor down to basement room (reminiscent of old town house family room). Just as I came off the stairs, realized I was dreaming, had maybe 7-8 seconds of lucidity. Walked to bookshelf, tried to see what was written on book covers, but did not see any text. Felt like breadth of environmental awareness kept narrowing into the book covers I was looking at, and I didn't have the ability to look back out and do other stuff. Woke up with (not scary) sleep paralysis.

Out of body showering + lucidity

Short lucid dream. After an encounter with a mouse behind a book on the bookshelf, then a short board meeting where one of the ladies leading it up kept running into people as she was trying to usher people out (thought she'd be stuck in three meetings in a row)... I walked to the next room where the shower was going hot and full blast, and wondered who was supposed to be in it. I managed to imagine my own person standing behind the curtain (obscured but still visible -- think fragmented light), and thought that was interesting. Next I walked over to my dresser (in the bookshelf/conference room) and looked for a minute, by this time realizing that I was in control of my dream. I reached my hand up to my face and touched it -- however, I did not feel any touch or pressure. Regardless, I started feeling around some more, but finally lost my concentration and drifted awake.