Failed lucid dreamer

I’ve programmed myself to notice when cell phones appear in my dreams and then to try to dial Michael, my husband, by tapping the numbers on the dial pad.

In dreams this can be really difficult to do. The dial pad morphs, the numbers get jumbled, or extra hashes or asterisk combinations are required. This complication is supposed to alert me to the fact that I’m dreaming, at which point lucid dreaming begins.

In lucid dreams we can explore being conscious in the dream state. We can take control of the dream if we wish, do whatever we want with all our senses alive, or flow with the dream as a conscious observer, simultaneously occupying two parallel worlds, our dreaming world and our waking life world.

One thing many lucid dreamers love to do is fly.

Last night, deeply dreaming, the chair I was sitting on lifted into the air and then resettled onto the floor. My friends, gathered around the table, were amazed. It happened again, only higher this time, and again, only zipping around the room, and finally I flew the chair upside-down before returning to the table.

I had no idea that I was dreaming. I remembered being able to do this on many occasions, and told my friends that although it was easy to do, the sense of wonder was always intense.

An alert must have been raised at some level in my mind because I decided to find a cell phone and dial Michael. The cell phone was a tiny square iPod in the palm of my hand that morphed through several versions of iPods and iPhones before I summoned up one with a reasonable dial function and began dialling. Still oblivious to the fact that I was dreaming, I told my friends that this kind of wonderful magic happens all the time in my life.

So far I had missed all the clues that I was dreaming, and I continued to be clueless through all the complications of trying to call Michael. In the end I gave up, and wandered over to the corner where a scientist sat at a desk, writing. As I was telling her about my wonderful magical life, she gave me a querying look, and the question formed on my lips, Am I dreaming?

I applied the acid test. I tried to fly without the aid of a flying chair. I rose to my tiptoes, bent my knees, flapped my arms, and tried to achieve lift-off, only to stumble about like a toddler trying to jump. Nothing. Totally grounded. I couldn’t fly, so clearly I wasn’t dreaming. If I had been dreaming, I would have been able to fly, I reasoned. Clearly I was awake.

One failed lucid dreamer.

While my dream was insightful on an analytical level, a dialogue with my scientific rational self about my daily experiences of life’s magic, that’s not the point of my tale.

The beauty of lucid dreaming is not so much the opportunity to consciously play within a dream, but the opportunity to wake up to the illusion of reality while deep in the experience. In lucid dreams I have not been able to truly distinguish which reality – dreaming or waking – seems more real to me.

On a daily basis we all wake up after a night’s sleep, somewhat surprised to yet again emerge from a reality we believed in. We might leave it there, or we might wonder if this waking life reality is also an illusion, one from which we will awake into certainty, or perhaps into a series of illusionary realities.

We might be wowed by the magic and the mystery of potentially experiencing awakenings into a series of worlds, or we might sit with our current waking reality and ask how we might acknowledge our illusions – our beliefs, judgements, suffering – and hold them so lightly that magic happens.

 

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