Day 4: Second Dream About Chicken Nuggets

I wake up at 2:15 to pee for the first of six straight nights. I can’t fall back asleep, so I take a walk outside and look at the stars. A shooting star scoots all the way across the sky for 10 seconds. I hold my stare at a random cluster of stars for 3 minutes. I believe I can feel the earth rotating. I go back to bed.

There’s a sign up announcing a change in the daily schedule. An extra hour and a half of mandatory meditation has been added right after the scheduled afternoon meditation for the teaching of Vipassana – 2.5 hours of straight meditation without a break, Jesus Christ.

The Vipassana technique Goenka teaches has you sweeping your attention across all the parts of your body watching for sensations, gross and subtle, trying to react to pleasant sensations without craving or grasping, and to painful sensations without aversion. The idea is that your unconscious expresses itself through subtle but (if you work really hard at it) observable sensations. Your reactions (craving, aversion) to these sensations make you miserable. If you can develop equanimity in response to the subtlest sensations, the thinking goes, you will liberate yourself from misery.

The beginning of the recording makes us repeat after the voice on tape to formally ask the teacher to “please teach me Vipassana” which, YOU’RE GOING TO TEACH IT TO ME ANYWAY!. The teaching is in the form of a guided meditation / hypnotic induction, taking you slowly through each small section of the body then listing at each stop every type of sensation you can feel (itching, tingling, heat, cold, pain, tighness, no sensation at all, etc.).

Toward the end, Goenka tells us that from now on all sits will be adithana, “sits of strong determination”, ie no moving, no eye-opening, no unclasping of the hands or uncrossing of the legs for the entire hour. Though I'm dying by the end of the 2.5 hours, I'm also manic and tell myself I could stay here for 20 days or 100 days -- complete indifference! This passes too.

I try to induce another sex dream, but instead I get my second dream about chicken nuggets. I’m eating a 9-piece at the top of a staircase secretly witnessing my aunt blowing my uncle. Even though I’m discouraged that his dick is much, much bigger than mine, I think it’s cute that they still have an oral sex life. Later I’m at a restaurant with same aunt and uncle and my grandparents, and I tell everyone about the blowjob, and they get really sad and embarrassed, like “Why did you tell us that?”

Cut to a sex scene with my girlfriend. My sizeable nut lands on a wall. Jason M******* shows up and asks me to prove it. I show him the spot on the wall, which satisfies him. I wake up, convinced that I’ve had my 2nd ever wet dream, but alas, my pants are clean.

(200 pushups)