Friday, January 8, 2016

Lucid Dreaming.

The Knight's Dream, Antonio de Pereda. (Wiki.)



























Zach Neal




Something very strange has been happening lately.

It’s like I go to bed, and as soon as I put the book down, turn out the light, and close my eyes, the pictures start up in my head.

They’re very clear. Faces, places, buildings and vehicles, cities and towns, and they’re all unfamiliar—I’ve never laid eyes on them in my life.

The dreams can be pretty disjointed. I can’t make heads or tails of what’s going on from one scene to the next, although the individual scenes have a certain coherence—a man’s face materializing out of a sandy beach, me crashing an exotic car through someone’s terrarium…just weird shit that really doesn’t make much sense. How the hell you get from one scene to the next is a mysterious process of association at some subliminal level.

We all dream, and in the past, I’ve kept a note-pad beside the bed. I’ve written dreams down and tried to write them up as a kind of bizarro fiction. There is such a thing as directed dreaming, but I have no idea of what to try—or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.

It’s very strange to know that you are wide awake, and still to be essentially dreaming, for at its best I have no control over the pictures that I see.

This lucid dreaming state is a new one for me—who knows, maybe it’s the change of life, or just winter, or maybe lack of mental stimulation. This is a real enough prospect, when one’s life revolves around the computer and you’re spending an average of twenty-two and a half hours a day indoors. It is winter, after all.

I still dream the old-fashioned way. I wake up, barely remembering what I was just seeing and doing. The other day there were even a few bits of dialogue. I spoke, which seems unusual for me. I have no idea what I said—I probably asked the next poor bastard what was going on.

The fact that I can make it through the day sort of implies that I’m getting enough sleep.

I can’t help thinking that it serves some kind of purpose, biological, psychological, or less likely, spiritual.

The thing there is, that I really don’t believe in magic. (Telepathy, maybe. But not magic.)

If I could direct my dreams tonight, I would set them on some sort of problem-solving routine.

Or perhaps I am missing the point of dreaming at all—maybe it’s just a kind of mental gymnastics. Maybe there’s some deep and fundamental level of cognitive dissonance. If so, I have no idea of what it might be…do I hold mutually-contradictory beliefs? Probably. I suspect we all do—

More likely, my brain is at play and maybe that’s just healthy and normal.

Maybe it just needs to stretch its legs. Maybe it’s hungry, maybe it just wants to go somewhere—anywhere.

There are times when I wish I knew what it wanted.

There are times when I wish my subconscious would tell me what to do, although I have a funny feeling it does anyways—my stomach tells me when I’m hungry and not the other way around, after all.

I wouldn’t mind knowing what the next scene in my book should be, for surely I would write that down and take a look at it.


END