Lucid

I dream. I dream a lot.

It’s ironic, really, that someone whose sleep is so broken is rewarded by such a sumptuous palette of dream-story every night. (#narcolepsy)

But there you have it. I’m a dreamer.

Being partially asleep in your waking life is one thing, but being partially awake within your sleeping life is something altogether different.

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For starters, it means you understand the connections between things that more awake, rational brains are inclined to ignore, which give you compelling creative insights. It means you are never, ever going to run out of ideas. It means your imagination is huge.

And because the land of dreams is all about the subconscious, the deep things that drive us, and because you are so intimately immersed in it every night, it means you understand a lot, more than most, about why people do what they do, and how most of them are completely unaware of it in themselves.

Most of my dreams are normal, garden variety dreams, in which bizarre things happen and stuff doesn’t make sense. The sort of dreams that my friends and I laugh about when I recount them. But some of them are longer, movie-length even, with coherent story lines full of complex details. These are the ones I write down, as they contain my most brilliant story seeds.

 

And other, very few dreams have such vivid intensity to them, such arresting power, it’s as if they are real. In them, I understand that I’m dreaming. I am awake inside my own sleep.

These are lucid dreams. They’re the ones I pay attention to.

In these searing moments of dream clarity, I am sometimes visited by people who look and talk and act just as they do in real life. They stand in my bedroom in their dream-bodies and tell me stuff I cannot possibly know, which later turns out to be true.

... like the friend who silently pointed to a gaping hole in her breast. (In waking life, she had pre-cancerous breast changes in the breast on that side, and needed surgery).

... like the friend who wore pyjamas, and read erotic fiction to me. (In waking life, she was secretly writing and publishing it online).

... like the friend who held a picture of a tiny grave, planted over with flowers. (In waking life, she terminated a pregnancy and grieved silently, because she believed it that it was her responsibility to bear that devastation alone).

These lucid dreams are not frequent. And I’m not always sure what to do about the things I learn in them. But their intensity burns them into my waking consciousness. Their effect on me is always profound, and I am deeply unsettled by them until they are confirmed or resolved in the waking world.

I don’t know how or why this particular type of dream happens to me. But I do know this: if someone has shown up in this way, there is something I need to know. And it’s important.

I had one of these most-lucid of dreams a couple of months ago. Strange, because it involved someone with whom I have no apparent level of intimacy. And yet… and yet… there he was, standing next to my bed, showing me something very specific that I should look for. And telling me to pay attention.

Ever since then, I have been watching for the thing his dream-self showed me, trying to find it. Or rather, trying to find the real-life thing that corresponds to the dream-symbol he showed me. (Because, FYI, I do know the difference. I’m not completely crazy). 

But I haven’t found it. I don’t know where it is, or even what exactly I'm looking for. Only that it has the colour of orange or the energy of connection, and it’s significant.

     

Instead, I am haunted by the feeling that I’ve missed something. Is there some insight I'm supposed to have achieved? Something I should have done?

But the question that really plagues me is Have I forgotten something?

  

And in the lingering spiritual disquietude, it seems that my waking world has been tipped ever so slightly off its axis. I’ve noticed peculiar things happening around me - things that provoke more questions than answers, things that defy explanation, unless I draw upon my story-making sense to arrange them into theories of varying plausibility. I’ve done a few odd things myself, tentatively feeling out where the boundaries of the strangeness lie. But even after I’ve filtered out those events that might have been normal things bent askew by my imagination, there are others that persistently defy explanation. It’s as if the dream has snaked free from its diaphanous vault and whispered into the natural world, slithering in wide arcs around me, looping through my days and weeks. These fragments of evidence coalesce into a shifting motif, like pieces of torn paper scattered in the wind that form themselves into shapes even as they eddy about me.

And in the middle of this ever-expanding vortex of unexplained events and unanswered questions, I am taunted by the abrasive discomfort of not-knowing. Of not being able to reconcile my waking life without the answers promised by a dream.