So how's this for cool: This morning I achieved a state of lucid dreaming.
The night was truly a bizarre one for dreams, including: a delicious breakfast of cereal in the morning which required I fill my computer case with milk and Rice Chex (and, despite reminding myself not to turn it on while I was eating, worked fine despite the milk). Drew Carey as a sitcom father whose teenaged daughter thought that her boyfriend taking her "parking" actually meant they would engage in a hilarious mock-battle (complete with shouting "POW!" while faux-punching far off-target). Dr. Smith from "Lost in Space" using his Ultimate Technique, Summon Robot, which I countered by a Kingdom Hearts-style finishing move...
Amidst all this, my brain tossed me something it has, on occasion, done before: repeating the same sequence multiple times. The first two repetitions occurred in the main depths of my sleep cycle. Around 9:22 I woke up, glanced at my clock, grumbled because I only had half an hour left to sleep, and shut my eyes again.
After a few minutes of randomness which I don't properly remember, my dream segued into a third repetition of that same sequence (running, which ended in a bizarre pose at the end) -- only this time, the dream-actors didn't seem inclined to hit the pose. With what consciousness the dream allowed me, I pushed for the dream-actors to complete the sequence properly... then became
aware of what I was doing.
Generally, when I'm dreaming, I know that I'm dreaming on a semi-conscious level. That is to say that I recognize that my dreams are not real, are dreams, but that knowledge is not something I can act upon, not something it occurs to me to act upon, except in situations such as a nightmare where I can force myself to wake up. By pushing my dream-actors, then becoming aware that I was doing so, I bridged the divide between knowledge and action.
Becoming aware, my first act was to reach for full consciousness.
At first I thought I'd failed, and woken myself up. I felt awake and alert, aware of my shut eyes and fully conscious. After a moment, however, I became aware of the dream continuing, and the dramatic disconnect between what I was *seeing* and what I was *experiencing*. On a certain level I remained aware of the same sort of nothingness that one sees when one's eyes are closed, but the dream-images still fed through on a deeper level more commiserate with *imagination*. Images that are not seen, but processed as sight. I can't truly explain it in words, but it's easy enough to understand: just close your eyes and imagine something, then examine how you see it without seeing it. The dream went the same way.
The state was very similar to, but not the same as, a state I sometimes achieve when falling asleep. In the latter state, a half-dream state occurs beneath the conscious levels of my thoughts, something simple and repetitive like running or driving. My conscious thoughts run on, still focused and under my control, but the dream-state continues on until it abruptly ends with the car crashing or me tripping, at which point I jerk fully awake with a yelp and a pounding heart.
My lucid dream state was not the same. For one, it was startingly difficult to maintain. I still slept, but my mind had access to its full range of faculties; as I've said, I felt awake. Consequently, to act in my dream I had to divorce desire from reality, lest my brain turn my desire to move into actual motion and wake myself up thereby. Moreover, my consciousness itself balanced acutely between sleep and waking solely on mental effort by my part. And it *did* take effort, a very deliberate one to hold that balance.
Unfortunately, after all that build-up, I actually got to do very little with my newfound lucidity. My dream, while I considered this new state, had fed my image of a ladder of sorts. To prove that I could, to make myself act, I climbed it. The action was subtly but very definitively different from a normal dream action, in ways I can't quite describe except to say that dream-actions have a certain foreordained aura, a level divorced from actual actions, that this did not. And I looked into the sky, without looking, by which I mean I didn't need to turn my dream head to see it. I merely desired to look into it, and -- I didn't see it, so to speak, so much as *knew* it.
And then my balance slipped and I woke up, or my alarm woke me up. Something disrupted it, in any case, for my memory ends with that knowledge of the sky and my desire to do more.
Still, though not much happened, it was still an incredible experience.
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impressed