Mindblogging

I’ve been thinking about this morning’s lucid dream experience. Even though I couldn’t seem to change my surroundings or events as in a normal lucid dream, I still find it damn cool simply that I was somewhere else! It doesn’t matter where it was or if the place bent to my will or not. My body was in bed and I was somewhere else!

I am always afraid to talk or speak loudly in lucid dreams, as I mentioned before. Kelly reported that to her knowledge I did not shout in my sleep, though I certainly did in my dream. I’m often aware of both bodies – my dream one and my sleeping one – and find it challenging sometimes to know which one is reacting to my commands. This time around I wasn’t aware of my sleeping body even though I knew I was dreaming.

I recently repurchased a copy of Steven Laberge’s Exploring The World Of Lucid Dreaming, having given away all of my previous copies. I hope to reacquaint myself with the techniques suggested to lucid dream at will. This stuff is just too cool not to do on a regular basis!

I slept shallowly due to a nagging cough I seem to get early in the morning. Sleeping shallowly seems to be a recipe for lucid dreaming. At least for me!

It was a long lucid dream. I woke up thinking it lasted close to two hours, though how I would really know that I have no idea. Inside the dream I seemed to do far more things than would be possible in two hours, much less the typical 90-minute dream cycle. It felt like a day or two, to be honest.

In my dream, I was exploring old buildings on a campus of some sort: walking up and down stairs on the bottom floors and moving between them through underground hallways or tunnels. An interesting image stayed with me upon waking. It was a picture of a well-dressed audience sitting in wood-backed seats. Every other seat was occupied by a real person (or couple), while the empty seat or seats next to them had a white cardboard circle with a caricature of their face. It was a very clever work of art in my eyes, something that would be fun to shoot someday.

One couple at the foreground was a man and a woman in their 70s. The woman was planting a kiss on the cheek of the man, who was offering a surprised look (this look was also on the caricature). I was drawn to this couple: is this a future Kelly and me?

An unusual thing for me was my apparent inability to change the scene, nor to induce other activity. I was fully aware I was dreaming. I even called for “clarity” when I felt lucidity slipping. I even felt afraid to shout in my dream for fear of waking up my wife. Still, the scene stayed the same.

Looking back on it now, I wonder if I wasn’t lucid dreaming after all. Perhaps I was having an out-of-body experience, or was visiting some other group reality. I wish I had been mindful enough to try more experiments but I was just happy to be awake in a dream again.