On Dreams and Sleep

Hi Readers,

I love to sleep, because it energizes me for the next day, because my bed feels good, and most importantly - because I am tired. But the daily nocturnal experience that most everyone encounters is not colonized or civilized. Instead, it is a swath of wilderness, filled with what is hidden in the deepest recesses of our mind. I am sure that everyone has had their own forays into the hinterlands of their minds (and for those who haven't, I truly feel sorry for them), and I am just trying to share some of my own experiences with the various weird experiences of sleeping and dreaming.

One unusual skill that I developed and recently lost touch of is the ability to know exactly the moment I am falling asleep. It sounds weird, right? Everyone has seen the land of conscious reality and dream reality separately, but the transition of "falling asleep" is another matter altogether. I don't know how common it is, but I am offering tips to readers about how to experience it.

You can start by lying on your bed, and rehearsing a scene that you know extremely well through your mind. For me, it is a scene that I saw at the Roman amphitheaters in the ruins of Ostia Antica, outside of Rome in Italy. The scene has to be familiar for two reasons. The first reason is that you need to be falling asleep at the same time, so you should not be thinking too hard. A familiar scene is perfect. The second reason is the following. As you fall asleep, you will inevitably cross what I call the "crazy" boundary. This is the boundary where crazy things (the things that, when you wake up from a dream, you said "how in the world did I think this was possible/normal in my dream?!?) begin happening. As you cross the boundary, the scene in your mind will become usurped by the "crazy" you hiding in the recesses of your brain.

However, in my personal experience, this boundary does not always correspond with the boundary of lucid awareness. So what will happen is, you will start seeing weird things happen in the scene in your head. (I'm walking up the stairs of the amphitheatre, and then I turn around and begin going on facebook in the computer lab in Engineering Hall, and then I notice that I have to shift gears to go to a higher speed in the car - etc). With a little training, you'll learn to recognize the "crazy" line, such that you'll be able to say, "Things don't make sense. Oh my god! I'm about to fall asleep!" before actually falling asleep.

And then there are dreams. Dreaming is such a quaint yet sublime experience. It is where creativity dictates reality. It's where you can live out your fantasies and horrors as if they were real. Most importantly, it allows your to escape from reality, into a world that you cannot experience anytime you are conscious.

My personal experience with dreams has been spotted. Back in elementary school, I had a period of a month when I would have the same nightmare night after night. I still remember the nightmare. I would be hiking with my family, and I would be in the lead of the hiking group which was hiking on a trail next to a drop-off cliff. Everytime I would turn to check on my family, one of the family members would jump off the cliffs to their death. Another nightmare that I remember from elementary school was that my mom and I were in a train when it crashed, and then a tornado came and sucked her away from me. I remember waking up from that nightmare in tears.

On the other end of the spectrum comes the awesome dreams . I love the dreams where I have superpowers, such as flying or telekinesis, because it is literally like acting out a dream in real life. Except it seems so real in the dream. You think about flying - and you fly. You want the door to open - and it opens. My first superpower dream was in elementary school - I could snap my fingers and make anything happen. I made it rain when my dad was trying to mow the lawn. And then I laughed so hard (in my dream) that I couldn't snap my fingers anymore and lost my superpower. Good times. =)

Along with the awesome dreams, but in a more taboo direction, are - what else? - sexual dreams. I definitely have lots of dreams about it (probably too many) involving the most random people that I would not think about in real life. It was almost never the people that I thought were hot, or had a crush on, or anything like that. I still remember my first 2 dreams. The first was about a guy in my class, the second was about a girl in my class. These both happened during middle school, which I guess was still a time when I might have still been attracted to both sexes (another blog post about this later). But it was the only time I ever dreamed about a girl sexually. Sexual dreams are the weirdest dreams ever. Sometimes I didn't even really know the person well, or at all. Sometimes I made the move, sometimes they did. Sometimes the person turned into a non-person. Sometimes weird, sometimes awkward, but always unpredictable.

I have read up on "lucid dreaming", where your consciousness is able to control the dream, so you can try things in your dream that you would never try in real life. Unfortunately it only happened to me a couple of times...but I think it would be awesome to actually master how to do it. But I have been able to influence what I dream about a couple of times. Sometimes I find that I dream about the last thing that I am thinking about when I fall asleep, so I'll be able to control that aspect of my dream.

Regardless of the control I have over it, dreaming is just so cool in general. I'd like to think that dreams are an outlet for the side of yourself that you are not able to let out in everyday life. If true, that would mean that, in order to take your understanding of yourself to the next level, you would look toward your dreams.

But for now, I am looking forward to another night's rest.

-FCDH