Dream a little dream

Jona has been messing around with her dreams lately, trying her best to remember them. Sounds innocent enough, huh? BUT (cue scary organ music) that's how it starts. Dreams are a risky business, but I'm not sure any of you will believe me. We humans have been fascinated by our dreams for thousands of years, of course, but the idea of stepping in and messing with them is, I think, a product of the New Age culture. The pinnacle of this might be lucid dreaming, a cute idea turned big business by Stanford psychologist Stephen LaBerge. Why be the passive recipient of dreams, when you can author them? That's the essence of lucid dreaming. The only reason a guy (hell, probably most women, too) would go to the bother of learning lucid dreaming would be the promise of unlimited, endlessly varied sex with whomever (or whatever) strikes his fancy at the moment, with no risk of disease or consequences. Overcoming nightmares, my ass. In fairness, in his FAQ, LaBerge hints that most people do this as a rather sophisticated means of jerking off. The roots of lucid dreaming predate LaBerge, who has been futzing with dreams at least since the 80s. I first encountered the idea in Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan books. The Yaqui brujo Don Juan has Carlos (a UCLA anthropology grad student) work on finding his right hand in his dream. There's no significance to the right hand; if I remember correctly, Don Juan tells Carlos he could find his dick, if he preferred. The point was to exert control. Once Carlos could do that exercise every night, Don Juan instructed him to try to return to his dreaming body, turn his back on it, and walk away. I gather the overall plan was to induce some sort of out of body experience. As a kid, I ate this stuff up like cotton candy. I tried my best to look at my hand, and achieved a shabby degree of success. Whenever I did it, the rest of the dream became grainy, like a poor print of an old black-and-white movie. If I persisted in trying to control the dream, I lost it altogether and woke up. On the other hand, I could relax back into the dream, and lose the lucidity (that essential awareness, "this is a dream"), but what was the point of that? Then high school happened, and I had GFv1.0, which meant I no longer had any motivation to mess with my dreams. I didn't rediscover Castaneda until my last year of college. That's when all hell broke loose. Not at first, of course. At first, I had a lot more of those silly hand dreams. Then -- gradually at first, but with increasing frequency -- I began having dreams of flight. Now we're talking, I thought at the time. This was worth doing. Strange stuff began happening. In my first year of medical school, I dreamed I was in my bedroom, hovering near the ceiling. Something popped and I felt myself flung backward into cold darkness. I woke up in bed (where else?) thinking, What a rush! I'm not dippy enough to consider this an out of body experience, although I suspect many people would. No, I think it's far more plausible that my dreaming mind managed to recreate my bedroom in every detail, then gave me a little jolt. Mess with me, eh? I'll show you a thing or two. Not content with cheap theatrics, this same entity -- call it the subconscious, if you want to get all Freudian about it -- pulled out a new stunt. I began having waking dreams. I would wake up, go about my business, and only gradually realize from the oddness of my surroundings that this world wasn't quite real. The lights wouldn't turn on; the bathroom taps wouldn't work; my roommates would be hosting a huge party at 7:00 in the morning. That sort of thing. Meanwhile, the cool dreams continued: dreams of flying, or of soaring just a few feet over the ground, moving as fast as a car without any muscular effort. Also, I continued to have the occasional out-of-body dream, or dreams where I seemed to perceive reality from an unusual perspective (as a tiny speck, or a floating dust mote, and so forth). And so I kept scribbling in my log, relishing the fun stuff, dreading the scary stuff. I began having nested waking dreams. I'd wake up into a waking dream, eventually realize things weren't quite real, and then wake up into another waking dream. These dreams became more and more frequent, and the nesting became more and more complex. The night I had an eight-fold nested dream and spent the rest of the day metaphorically pinching myself, that's when I decided enough was enough. Why? Because it was becoming increasingly clear to me that my dreaming mind could create such a thoroughly convincing faux reality that I couldn't tell the difference. The difference, if there was one, had more to do with quantity than quality. Reality lasts longer. I don't think any bit of this was supernatural. No, I think my dreaming mind is just that clever (devious, vindictive, and/or bored). I have a vague, academic curiosity as to what that critter would have come up with next, but I'll leave that to someone more adventurous than I. D. Technorati tag: dreams