Shots Across The Bow

Lucid Dreaming

Have you ever been asleep and dreaming and knew that you were dreaming? If you have, you've experienced lucid dreaming. Now there are some that ascribe all kinds of magical or supernatural effects to it, but it seems to me it is just an altered state of consciousness, where the brain is functioning on a more primitive level.

I've experienced it fairly often, starting from when I was a kid. I used to have the typical nightmares of falling, or showing up at school nekkid, or missing final exams. One night, I dreamed I was riding in a car that was in an accident and crashed off the edge of cliff. I had been hanging onto the door when we crashed, and had ripped it away from the car when we ent over the edge, so I was still clutching the door as I hurtled down towards the rocks below. When I'd been falling for about an hour and a half, I realized that I must be dreaming, and decided to use the door as a wing, and change the falling to flying. That was my first lucid dream.

I still get that falling dream occasionally, but, whether I recognize the dream or not, I always convert falling to flying.

Now as a single parent, I have constant worries. Are my kids OK? Do I have enough money? Did I pay all the bills? Did I pick them all up from school? And on and on. It's not surprising that these fears sometimes leak into the funhouse mirrors of my dreams, where they can get magnified all out of proportion. Whenever I find myself in some desperate situation that looks hopeless, I ask myself if I'm dreaming. A good thumbrule is if you have to ask, you probably are, so the answer has always been yes. Once I know I'm dreaming, I simply change a couple of parameters and let the dream continue, without all the anxiety.

I've never practiced this, or tried to develop the skill, but it has been a very useful tool for relieving stress on the way to a good night's sleep.

There is another benefit though, one which really happened for the first time last night.

When I'm dreaming, a lot of times I act as a movie director. The Wachowski Brothers only wish they could make the movies I see. Everybody has dreams like that, but they usually lose focus part way through, during the transition from one REM period to another. When I'm in a lucid dream, during that transition time I put together the script for the next phase. On a good night, I can make a sequence last the night.

It isn't as conscious and controlling as I make it sound, more a matter of keeping the story moving along, keeping the focus where it needs to be, although on a couple of occasions that I can remember, I've had to do rewrites, since the story took a turn I didn't like.

Hey, it is MY dream after all!

Here's the bad part. Since I don't really practice remembering the dreams, when I wake up in the morning, I remember that I had a great dream, and maybe a fragment or two of the story, but the details slip away in the time it takes me to stumble from the bed to the bathroom.

Except for last night. I was in the middle of one of these stories, then realized I was dreaming, and started paying closer attention. While maintaining the air that anything is possible that is the hallmark of dreams, the framework was fairly consistant with reality. This time, when the segment ended, I decided to wake up, and wrote down the details of my dream. As I did, I realized that it would make a great framework for a novel in the vein of Voltaire's Candide or Dicken's A Christmas Carol. There's a great little bit with God, who looks and sounds like Mel Brooks, and a couple of cool twists in the story. It's not startlingly original; after all, there are only so many stories, and they've all been told a jillion times, but there's something about it that grabs me.

Now I have to write the darn thing.

Posted by Rich at May 18, 2003 3:18 PM | TrackBack