It was my last night in a hotel this week, so I decided to experiment with my sleep. My laptop was running on the desk across the room, so I set up this little script to play a little music clip to me every 90 minutes. The idea is that I’d hear the music and remember I am dreaming (or that I just awoke from a dream), or at least sleep more lightly than usual. The volume was set to a barely audible level – something I would notice but not be startled by.
while [ 1 ]
do
play /usr/share/system-config-soundcard/sound-sample.wav
sleep 5400
done
With my music set up, I settled into sleep after 10 PM, drifting off quickly. What followed was a night of extroadinary lucid dreaming, the like I haven’t experienced in a long, long time.
It seems I was in another world for hours. I could float and fly, and purposefully did so in front of a mirror, just to prove it to myself. I was quickly accepting of my dream state. I even shouted twice in my dream world, just to see what would happen. I could hear my voice echo in my dream room but no angry knocks occured on the hotel wall above my sleeping head. I was truly lucid.
I decided to wander around my old Navy ship, a common lucid dream setting for me. I went down many decks, checking things out. There were a few other guys there, acting as caretakers. In truth the ship scene was probably inspired by this visit two men made to an abandonded Distant Early Warning station in Alaska, a website I’d been looking at before bedtime.
Later in my dream, I was in my bedroom at home, during the day. Well aware I was lucid, I stuck my hands through the wall, marveling at the moist clay-like consistency and the crackling sound it made as my hands pushed through it. I could feel everything in the wall as my hands passed through it. For fun I followed with my head, pushing through to see the room on the other side. This lucid dreaming stuff is mind-blowingly fun.
Towards the end of the night, I decided to try some more practical experiments. I chose to view the winning lottery ticket for the upcoming draw. I managed to remember a few numbers before awakening, though not all of them. Even though I was lucid and fairly conscious,
I am skeptical any of these numbers will appear in the next drawing, knowing how unreliable numbers can be in a dream. One well-known lucid dreaming trigger calls for looking at any nearby digits or words: a clock, a sign, or anything similar. If the digits or words change radically after you turn back to them, you known you are dreaming. Thus I don’t trust numbers in dreams. It was fun to try, anyway.
Interestingly, after I awoke I got the feeling that a now-deceased friend was present in the dream, though I don’t remember specifically seeing him. I don’t normally expect anything other than thought-forms to make up my dream characters (in other words, the people I meet in dreams are usually the puppet-like creations of my mind). If actual visitors were in my dream I would have a hard time differentiating them at this point.
On the other hand, its possible that some of my lucid dream capers are not simply dreams but actual projections to other planes. I am not adept enough with projections (or lucid dreaming, for that matter) to really know the difference. Certainly my dream had projection-like qualities such as the floating and passing through walls.
My experiment proved far more entertaining and successful than I expected. I need to find a way of continuing this experimentation at home without disturbing my sleeping wife.