Lucid Dreaming

 

Wake up, you're dreaming, I can't stand your screaming,
Drowning out these prayers, just some words without meaning.
Spare all the preaching, my secret's worth keeping,
N o-one understands like I do.

Lonely As you,
Foo Fighters

 

This morning I finally did it. I didn't just have a lucid dream, I had three, in a row!

It was an excellent experience and unfortunately too exiting as everytime I realised I was asleep, I would begin to wake up.

The circumtsances under which these dreams took place are complicated, and not easily repeatable. Firstly I had been drunk for three nights in a row. Last night I had been to a barbecue and eaten a large steak. This I believe played havok with my digestion and hence I was awake most of the night, I only got to sleep at like 5am. Lastly and most interestingly, I got up this morning to find one of my quartz crystals had been facing me; pointy end first. I'm not sure which if any of these things affected me enough to make this night very different from the others, but I certainly hadn't put any value in crystals doing anything!


So the experience itself:

It started in a state between wake and sleep when I was just begining to feel tired; around 5am. I felt like I had just closed my eyes breifly and then opened them again. When I did everything looked normal in my room but I had a pain in my arm which was tucked under my head and under my pillow. So i pulled it out and looked at it.

I had like 8 fingers on it. my vision was kind of blurry and focussing was tough, but there it was, a hand with too many fingers, I was dreaming and I knew it. I awoke from the excitement.

When I calmed myself down again, I drifted off to sleep again, and this time it was a proper dream, I think Ali and I were going camping and were driving in the car. We had to stop and I got out and noticed the sky was dark which it hadn't been and the stars were making strange movements. I also saw two space shuttles flying out of the atmosphere symaltaneuosly which I knew could not happen. They both dropped there booster rockets in the sky above my head on their way into space. I knew at this point that I was dreaming and I woke up again.


Reviewing the second dream in my head I realised that there were a lot of things that were out of place in the dream, but it took something very odd for me to notice anything was wrong at all. It would seem that I am generally accustomed to dreams being inconsistent. The dream itself was also interesting from a reality point of view. When I realised I was awake and looked around, the dream had vivid colours, everything appeared clearer than in the waking world, and there was no sense of weather, i was not hot or cold, I was not being blown by wind, it was like an isolation room or something.


In the third dream I again found my hand and saw that I had 8 fingers, again I woke into the dream and again got too exited and woke up. The waking up process was very interesting. It was kind of like the feeling of being morphed from one body to another, I would be sucked back from the dream and slowy consciousness and feeling would enter my real body and leave the dream. On this last occasion I tried to hold on to the dream, but couldn't do it. weird feeling though!

 

So I'm not sure if i'll be able to do this again. Carlos said that once the dreaming attention is fixed, finding your hands and waking up can be done more easily, but there were so many things that may have triggered this dream experience that I do not think I can easily reproduce it. The alcohol, the lack of sleep, the indigestible steak, the unknown crystal pointing at my head.


I guess I'll find out tonight.

 

 

26/04/04

Back to Thoughts