Lucid

I’ve been lucid dreaming lately. It’s a strange experience. You’re going about your business as usual, driving your daughter to school, buying a new wall clock at Target, throwing all of your pens outside a window. And then suddenly, you get the feeling.

How can I explain the feeling? I can describe it, of course, but I’m not sure I can truly make you understand. It’s… it’s doubt. Sudden doubt, coming out of nowhere. Like a flash in your mind, like lightning, if that makes sense. Have you ever been struck by lightning?

I have. I remember the whole world going white – just white, everywhere, for a split second. And then everything went back to normal; but I couldn’t, you know? I was struck dead by the feeling, the entire otherness that came to be for just an instant. The world paused, just paused, but for me it stopped. I couldn’t move. I was petrified, for in that split second I saw something other than anything else I had ever seen: white, an immensity of white, an entire universe made only out of bland, texture-less white.

As if the real world, my world, was nothing but a fraud.

So that’s what the feeling is like. It’s certainty – the certainty that something is off, that things don’t quite add up. That there’s a contradiction, somewhere in the universe. All of a sudden, you realize that you are dreaming; I cannot explain it to you any better.

***

You are walking down an infinite aisle. You can hear the gravel scrunch under your feet, but other than that sound, the entire world has fallen silent. Except that doesn’t make any sense, does it? For all around you, you can see faces contorting in pain and grief, features contracted in silent sobs. You ought to hear them cry, you know. But you don’t.

At the end of the infinite aisle, you can see a casket. You know what’s inside – who’s inside. It’s like a confused certainty, anchored deep in your heart, making it bleed. You remember an accident, a fall down the stairs, a head hitting the hard corner of a step. But it feels surreal, so undeniably detached from the present that you cannot tell if it really happened.

You are walking – floating, really – towards that casket. But the aisle is infinite, and for that you are grateful: it means that you can never reach it. Never peer inside, never see the blank face of your mother waiting in a travesty of peace. Reality is distorted. It has to be, or you will have to face the unacceptable.

You have a speech ready, crumpled in your hand like the vulgar piece of paper it is. Should you try to read the very first word of it, you are almost certain that you will vomit. Your chest hurts. Your chest is compressed into a tiny little knot situated right where your heart should be, and you can feel your insides rebelling against that, wanting to expand, wanting to explode.

The aisle is infinite, yet you manage to walk it down entirely. Tell me, mourner. Are you dreaming?

***

You know, I used to chase lucid dreams. When I was younger, I read article over article on them: what they were, why they existed, how to have them. The last part, most of all. Controlling your dreams just seemed so extraordinary, you know? And I wanted to know what extraordinary felt like.

Well, it turns out extraordinary feels very mundane after all. I believe it has to do with the fact that whatever happens in your dreams has no impact whatsoever on your reality. In my dreams, I fought pirates and won, and then sunk my ship to the bottom of the ocean just to see what the sand looks like down there. But every time I’ve woken up, I was staring at the very grey, very decrepit ceiling that looms straight over my bed.

But I didn’t know that – couldn’t have known that – when I was a teenager. So chase I did. And wouldn’t you know? I found a four-step theory that worked wonders.

The first step to start having lucid dreams is to write down the normal, regular dreams that you do have – that is, if you can remember them. It’s slow, tedious work. You keep a journal, right beside your bed. And every time you wake up you lunge at it and start writing everything you can recall – before you forget; before it disappears forever and leaves only at the back of your mind a vague sensation that something happened and the deep disappointment that comes from having failed again at your assignment.

Fortunately, the more you write them down, the more you remember your dreams. It’s a virtuous circle, really. And it leads you to the second step. After a time – an eternity, to tell the truth – you wake up every morning and know exactly what dream you were just having. You remember it just as you remember the day before, just as you remember waking up. You remember it as if it were real.

And then, then you can go on to lucid dreams. It’s the last step, and it’s a simple one: you go to sleep, each and every night. You wait for your first lucid dream. You wait. You wait. You wait.

And when it comes… I couldn’t even describe it. Compare it, maybe… it’s like jumping off a plane, in a way. Have you ever jumped off a plane?

I have. I remember closing my eyes and taking a step forward, blindly, without ever knowing what I was getting myself into – otherwise I would have balked for sure, turned tail and ran and never looked back. At first, I was only falling. But then I opened my eyes and it hit me, like a ton of bricks, like a hard ground ten thousand feet below ready to smash me into pieces. I remember the delight then, and the terror. The exhilarating, choking, freeing feeling that I was dealing with forces much bigger – unconceivably bigger – than myself. I was only falling. But then I opened my eyes, and realized that I was flying.

I felt so powerful – and so utterly powerless to stop anything from going wrong… I felt invincible. I felt invincible and still knew that I was the most fragile thing to ever have existed.

That’s what lucid dreaming feels like. You can do anything – until you can’t. You control everything – until you don’t. You are perfectly safe – until you’re not.

***

You are dancing to the sound of a music you do not know. The beats are familiar, you think, yet no matter how hard you try, you cannot recognize the melody. You dance, nonetheless. Shaking your head and swaying your hips and raising your arms in rhythm. You have alcohol in your blood. A bit too much, perhaps.

The lights around you are green and pink and yellow, all equally blinding. You see life in flashes. One second, the handsome stranger in front of you is smiling at you and leaning forward, eyes hot and lips half-open, but then you blink and he’s gone. For every second that you live, you feel like there are fifty others that you miss – as if you just stopped existing for a while, and then came back.

But you don’t really care that much. You are dancing, dancing and dancing and dancing into oblivion, and reality is slowly becoming a blur you know nothing about. You do not know the music you’re dancing to. You do know that you are drunk – much, much drunker than you previously thought. Is it enough to justify these eclipses, these little rifts in the thread of time that are becoming more and more evident?

Does it even matter?

The music changes, and still you do not recognize it. Tell me, dancer. Are you dreaming?

***

Dreams are a funny thing, they really are. Tiny bits of reality that defy every single known law in the universe, nagging at the back of your mind when you wake up and then disappearing forever. Do you remember your dreams?

I do, of course. I’m a lucid dreamer. I remember every single one of them – them and their lesson, and their meaning, and their value. Would you believe that there was a time when I thought dreams didn’t make any sense?

It’s an easy mistake to make, to be fair. An easy delusion. We are so constrained, so limited by our usual perception of the world that we become incapable of understanding our own dreams. Because dreams are bigger than the universe we’re used to; dreams are an expansion, they’re something else, something more. They don’t abide by the rules we implemented to make the world around us make sense.

Take logic, for example. Dreams aren’t logical. You cannot explain the events that occur in them by closely examining the context, selecting causes and studying their effect on the world. There is not scientific explanation for you desperately wanting to learn to play guitar with two carrots and a small potato, or for the only reason why you cannot manage it to be that the potato is not small enough. But why would that make dreams non-sensical? Things mean what you want them to mean, and they exist and happen because you figured that perhaps they could. Dreams are an extreme version of our reality – a version with no bounds and no ends, only limitless horizons. Can you play a game if it doesn’t have any rules?

Dreams are also non-linear. And how could they be? Linearity comes from the universe being the center of itself. Something happens, something outside of yourself, outside of your sphere of influence, outside of anything you could ever consider to be part of you, and you react to it. By the very foundation on which reality is built, you are passive, we are all passive, our entire lives.

But dreams are different. Your dreams are about you, what you feel, what you fear. You do something, anything, and then think of what led you to this point. And so of course, dreams are non-linear. For you have to accomplish your present in order to make sense of your past, and thus in your dreams you will always act before going back and changing the past accordingly. You can move in a circular timeline, picking up plot points where you abandoned them to revisit them again and again – and so goes that dream where you forget your keys inside your house, go back to fetch them and forget them again, and again and again, forever on.

You can do anything you like, truly, for there are no rules. Lucid dreams are addictive, because taking control of your dreams means taking control of the universe. You can distort space and time and common sense, bend them as you please, cut them and sew them back up in a different order, reverse them entirely. Have you ever reversed the course of time?

I have. I remember, standing on the very edge of a cliff, looking down on the entire world, looking up at a clear blue sky. Asking for lightning to strike me.

***

You are standing at the edge of the world. The entirety of the known universe stands behind you – and before you, a door open to a cliff, and nothing else besides. You are standing, running, driving yourself over the edge.

And then you are falling. It is a vertiginous sensation – the kind to jolt you awake, breathless and tensed up in your own bed. But you do not wake up – the trick lies there. You fall. You keep falling.

Your eyes are closed, though you do not know why. You hadn’t realized it before; how black the world was, how empty. It only seemed natural, but now, skydiving with the wind rushing faster and faster across your face, swelling the simple T-shirt on your back, you cannot bear it anymore. You open your eyes. You stop falling.

You’re all alone in the world, the only thing to ever have existed. You have the vague reminiscence of a plane bringing you this high, of other people being there with you, of a parachute being strapped to your back. But your back is bare now, and the people are gone, and the plane has vanished. You are the only one in the sky.

You are flying. Arms outstretched as far as they can go, hair dancing in the wind, eyes wide open. Tell me, jumper. Are you dreaming?

***

Of course, as usual, there is a trick. There always is. The trick is a simple one and it goes like this: you must be absolutely certain that you are in fact dreaming for the lucid dream to be safe.

At first, it is very easy. You’re throwing all of your pens outside a window and it seems perfectly logical until you stop to really think about it. You come to the conclusion that this is not, in fact, a reasonable attitude. You come to the conclusion that you are dreaming, and go on to have a great lucid dream.

But then it gets harder, more ambiguous. You find yourself needing more elaborate techniques.

The four that worked best for me are some of the most renowned. Count your fingers: if you do not have five of them, chances are you’re dreaming. Check the clock: if time moves in reverse, or by jolts, or otherwise non-linearly, chances are you’re dreaming. Press the light switch: if it fails to turn on and off the light as it should, chances are you’re dreaming.

And so, more and more I found myself at Target, buying wall clocks for every single wall in my house. I took the habit of counting my fingers every time I passed through a door. I started mechanically playing with the light switches whenever I was home.

There’s a flaw to this reasoning though, an inescapable flaw. In dreams, any expectation of a certain result will bring this result about. If you check your hand half-expecting to see five fingers there, then five fingers will you see. If you look at a clock and expect the clock hands to be moving according to a 60-second cycle, then they will be. If you press a light switch with the intention of turning on the light, then you will succeed. And how to tell, then, whether or not you are dreaming?

As I’ve said, I’ve been lucid dreaming lately. They’ve been strange dreams; dreams that felt to close to my reality for me to really be certain that they were in fact dreams. And here’s the thing: being unsure, I can neither trust the usual tests, nor make the most of the dream. For if I have any doubt about it, then throwing myself from the second floor in order to go out flying is stupidly dangerous. And worrying about this actually being real makes me doubt that something extraordinary could happen – something like a bolt of lightning striking me out of a clear blue sky – and thus it doesn’t, for I don’t truly believe in it.

I’ve been feeling lost, and small, and scared. I’ve been feeling like I have no control at all over my own life; like I went too far down the road and ignored the warning signs along the way, and am now trapped and unable to go back. Like all of this is a bad dream, one I have yet to wake up from. And it could be, for all I know. Have you ever woken up from a dream that lasted a month and still, to this day, makes you feel unsure of which memories are fake and which aren’t?

I have. I have. I have.

***

You are going about your business as usual. You are driving your daughter to school in your normal car, at the normal time. The luminous dial on the dashboard ticks away the minutes just like it should, and though you keep counting your fingers on the steering wheel, there are only ever five of them.

You cannot shake the feeling inside you, gnawing at your insides, whispering in your ear. You try to ignore its what if’s and its perhaps. You don’t truly manage to.

You count your fingers on the wheel, relentlessly. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Again and again, one two three four five, onetwothreefourfive, onetwothreefourfive. It isn’t reliable, you know. But you cannot think of anything else to do to reassure yourself.

You scrutinize your surroundings as you drive, searching for inconsistencies, for logic flaws in the vehicles and buildings and people all around. You find none.

It could be because all of this is real, of course. But then again, how could you ever be certain of that?

Everything is right where it is supposed to be. So tell me, dreamer.

Are you dreaming?