#49: Lucidity Achieved? (Dream Report)
After achieving greater consciousness than ever before in the dream world, I am left worrying that my bias against science might threaten my ability for further lucidity
Standing in the huge living room, whose ceiling seemed to loom some three stories above me, I could see dozens of people around the pool through the tall windows. The guests’ figures being blurry and undefined, I didn’t recognize any of them. The next moment, I was in one of the mansion’s bedrooms, fornicating with a man whom I was certain I had met on the back patio. But after just a few moments of revelry, I was yet again standing in the middle of the living room, and I looked around with some confusion. Questions came to mind. Who was that man? Who were all these people? And how did I get here?
These confusing inquiries were unstable, quickly vanishing from my consciousness when a friend suddenly approached me in the kitchen. Over his shoulder, I could see the mysterious merrymakers jumping into the water, and the next second I was standing on the lawn near some sprinklers while my friend pointed an accusing finger in my face. Little kids were running through the spraying water, even as the activities near the pool behind them took on an increasingly hedonistic character.
“My mom sent me the email you sent her,” my friend said, laughing mockingly. “You’re the one who started all that shit with your other friends, aren’t you?”
“No!” I replied, enraged by his misinformation. “How can you even suggest that?”
“You told my mom yourself,” he said. “You sent her an email. Now you’re going to lie to me?”
“What email?”
“The email you sent my mom.” He shook his head at me, his face showcasing his disappointment at my apparent lie. “No one is going to believe your story now.”
Then I was back in the living room. Unable to imagine I would ever speak with my friend’s mom about that subject, I was certain I had never sent her any email. It was strange to even consider that he or his mom would interest themselves in the details of that old dispute, let alone so strongly that he would confront me about it at the party. Wait, the party? Who were all those people around the pool? How did I get here?
Then I was standing near the pool, walking around with clothes and socks on. The man with whom I had fornicated approached me, his muscular abdomen throbbing above the waistline of his slim underwear.
“Hey,” I said to him.
He looked at me curiously. “I’m sorry, do I know you?” he asked. “I feel like I do.”
“Well, yes,” I said, “we just had sex in the bedroom.”
“Oh right,” he said.
We went back to the bedroom with a few other people and fornicated again. I never managed to see any of their faces very clearly.
Then I walked back out into the living room. Staring through the windows, I tried to differentiate between the blurry figures huddled together near the hot tub, swimming in the water, and lounging on the pool chairs. Something was wrong with this place. How did I get here? Where had I just been? The others emerged from the bedroom and walked past me, giggling and heading back to the pool. But they were different now. Their faces, hair, genders, races, and body types had changed.
Turning around, I saw my wife standing by the kitchen sink. And right then, I knew what was going on here. I walked over to her. She seemed at first to be doing dishes, but the water from the faucet ran not over plates or utensils but rather into a swirling blob of bright melted porcelain in which she stirred a cloudy blue sponge.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
I took her by the hand. “We’re in a dream,” I told her, almost whispering.
She laughed. “Are you going to tell me about simulation theory again?”
“No, listen,” I said, “we really are in a dream! Don’t you remember?”
“Remember what?” She continued stirring the sponge in the whirlpool of liquified ceramics.
“You don’t need to do dishes here,” I said. “This is a dream!”
“This is a party,” she corrected me.
I sighed. “Answer this,” I said to her. “How did we get here? Huh?”
She froze and looked at me, but she was smiling.
“We were just together in bed,” I said. The memory of the real world, in which I had been mere moments ago, was suddenly totally clear in my mind. “Right before we fell asleep! Don’t you remember? We’re dreaming now! We were just going to sleep!”
She laughed. “This isn’t a dream, Andrew,” she said.
“Oh really?” I asked.
I walked over to a plain wooden chair. It was just sitting independently in the middle of the room, uncoupled to either the central furniture set of couches and armchairs or the extravagant thrones which encircled the dining table. “Watch this!” I said. I picked up the armchair and threw it up toward the ceiling three stories above me.
Exhilarated, I felt nothing at all in my muscles. Effortlessly, I had grabbed this bulky object and tossed it into the air. Now it was accelerating toward the ceiling just as if I’d chucked a tennis ball. Arriving at its target dozens of feet above, the chair smashed into the thin stretch of wall separating the windows from the overhead support beams. A great crashing sound accompanied the devastating explosion. Chunks of wood and girthy crystals fell gracefully from above. Sharp, jagged glass fragments and splintered oak covered the ground all around the doorway leading out to the pool. No head turned toward the commotion; the poolside carousal continued unabated.
I looked back at my wife, who was still wasting her time with the dishes. “You see that?” I asked. I walked right up to her. “This is obviously a dream!”
“You need to clean that up,” she said. But she didn’t seem all that bothered by it.
“How do you not see that this is a dream?” I demanded. “We were just together in bed!”
She shook her head. “This isn’t a dream,” she said. “Clean up your mess.”
“Whose house is this?” I asked.
She laughed. “Whose house is this,” she repeated.
Then, looking around, I realized it looked almost exactly the same as an Airbnb my friends and I had once gotten in New Mexico, although it was far more ornate and also much larger. I told her so, but she was still focused on moving her sponge around in the sink’s meaningless bright vortex.
“Here,” I said. “See that drawer? Pull out some scissors, open them up, and throw them at me.”
I jogged to the other side of the room, positioning myself near the window. Facing her, I saw her opening the drawer. I prepared to defend myself from the scissors. Without taking her other hand out of the sink, she pulled out some scissors, opened them, and threw them directly at me. I caught them easily and flung them to the side. I looked at my hands. Though I had felt the sharp edge of the blade slam into my fingers, there was no blood, not even so much as a cut.
“More!” I said. “Throw more!”
At first, with a delighted smile, she threw the scissors at me in twos or threes. But I prodded her on, urging her to attack me with more. Dozens of scissors flowed toward me with the graceful movement of a perfectly coordinated flock of birds, while my wife’s arm, which apparently controlled all this, moved smoothly and clearly, just as if she were throwing the scissors one by one. Eventually, multitudes of open scissors seemed to rise up endlessly from the small drawer by the sink, whose faucet continued running into an expanding cloud of bubbles. All of the scissors were open, and they assaulted me like a plague of locusts, the silver of their metal blades and the blackness of their handles eventually blotting out any view I might have of either my wife or the sink. I only knew she was still there from her laugh and the sound of the running water. Easily, I caught some scissors and flung them to the side with one hand, while effortlessly defending myself with the other. Finally, the storm passed, and the whole floor was littered with thousands of scissors. Then they all just vanished, and my wife moved her arms around in the bubbles at the sink like nothing had ever happened. I scanned the floor for any sign of debris, but it was as if the scissors never were.
“Don’t you remember!” I shouted. “We were just in bed!”
“You need to clean up the mess by the door,” she said.
I began then to doubt whether this was an actual dream. What if I really had thrown a chair at someone’s wall and it had exploded? Whose house was this and what would be the repercussions? Would I owe anyone money? I cringed. I would hate to owe someone money. Precaution moved me toward rebalancing the risk-to-reward ratio of my behavior, and I hesitated to continue behaving as if I were in a dream. If I couldn’t even convince my wife that I was in a dream, then maybe this was truly reality.
I spent some time with various groups around the pool, trying to act normal. The longer I persisted, the more real everything seemed. I wanted nothing more than to wake up and see whether I was right, but then I was energized and just getting started with the poolside drinking in my socks and jeans. Waking up seemed as impossible as falling asleep.
I went inside. My wife was now sitting with some people on a couch in the living room. After another failed attempt to convince her, I turned to walk back outside. They all thought I was a psycho. She had looked at me like I was a lunatic, and so had all the grainy strangers sitting around her. It was as if I were a madman, and I feared the consequences of admitting to all my recent swim buddies and amorous partners that I had no clue who any of them were. I could be hospitalized. But no, I told myself, remembering the chair and the scissors; this cannot be reality. This is a dream.
Just as I stepped back into the sunlight, a former coworker of mine was walking toward me beside the glowing blue pool. My forehead was level with her waist, and I had to tilt my head back to make eye contact. Once I did, her face lit up with surprise, and I remembered why she annoyed me so much. “Oh my god,” I called out to her with a forced but convincingly giddy pleasantry, “it’s you! You’re here too!”
“It’s so good to see you!” she said, and she spread out her arms for a hug.
Reminding myself that I was in a dream and had a right to do whatever I wanted, I leapt up toward her head, and I dangled precariously from her neck like a little monkey in the trees. She put me down like a cute little animal, and after reprimanding me for my misbehavior, she was my size again. Bright green grass and cool blue water was everywhere. The man with whom I had fornicated came over and bummed me a smoke. I exhaled up toward the sunny sky, and I felt the sweet sensation of nicotine rushing into my head. Then I woke up, and I was in bed beside my wife.
With immense satisfaction, I realized I had achieved my goal at last. I had been aware enough I was in a dream to begin committing insane and impossible acts just for the fun of it. But how, I wondered in those confused waking moments, had my wife not believed me that we were in a dream together? No matter. For the moment, I had to write down notes in my phone about everything that happened. This would reinforce the memories of it all and help increase the chances of more lucidity in the future.
I went back to sleep. The next day, I told my wife about how I had encountered her in a lucid dream and tried to convince her that we were both dreaming. The whole incident seemed to call into question whether I had truly had a lucid dream. I hadn’t realized that the Dream Her couldn’t be the Real Her, which might mean that I hadn’t achieved the full awareness of being in a dream which I have sought for so long. Had I really had a lucid dream? Or had I dreamed that I was lucid dreaming?
But even then, I couldn’t help but ask. “So you don’t remember the dream?”
She gave me a doubtful look, similar to how she’d reacted in the dream world. “No,” she said.
“So you really don’t think it’s possible for people to, like, dream together? Or like to be in each other’s dreams?”
“No,” she said.
“I just kept doubting I was really in a dream,” I said. “I kept wondering if it was real.”
“Maybe you didn’t really lucid dream yet,” she suggested.
It was disappointing to contemplate. Nevertheless, I was motivated by my recent achievement. Triumphantly, I pointed out that never before had I gained quite that level of awareness in a dream. In the dream, I had been able to remember, with complete accuracy, exactly how we had both been struggling to fall asleep just before the dream. For the first time, I had a firm grasp on true reality, even as I moved about in the dream world. It had been the first dream during which I had intentionally, though briefly, behaved with the complete lack of restraint and consideration of consequences which the dream world supposedly affords. “Supposedly,” I mean, just in case dreams are not really private but rather potentially shared, as I wish they were.
Encouraged by my recent success, I will carry forward the techniques for further lucid dreaming which I have been developing. This was only the latest stepping stone. My wishful thinking inclines me to believe that one day I might be able to enter into a shared dream space with someone from my life, although whether we will both remember it - or whether they too will be lucid - seems unclear. I almost wish I could discard this foolish delusion as easily as I came to deny the reality of Santa Claus. The dream versions of my friends will either argue with me that we are not in a dream, thus undermining my ability to be fully lucid by filling my head with doubts. Or they will agree with me that we are both in a dream, and that we are sharing the dream space together. But then if Dream Them is not really the Real Them, am I truly lucid, or am I simply having a dream that I am sharing the dream space with a friend?
My fantasy of the shared dream space is fortified by nothing more than a powerful wish for the universe to be more magical and mystical than the bland mechanistic materialism of a soulless and Darwinistic atheism. It cannot be true; it is a baseless faith which perhaps holds me back. And yet when the time came, I could not break through its defenses enough to realize in my dream that the person by the sink was not really my wife. Am I doomed to always believe in the reality of the Dream Person? Will I ever, in the dream world, be able to internalize the scientific certainty that there is no shared dream space in which my friends and I can meet? If I don’t internalize that, can I ever behave with true disregard for all real-world consequences? Or does the very nature of that certainty’s scientific basis inherently bias me against it, dooming me to never really immerse myself in the dream world as it actually is? I might have to accept science in order to achieve the true lucidity I seek, and yet I fear that this very science may blind me from enjoying some even more fantastical reality. I am not yet willing to live in the materialist’s world, purged of hope for something more.
Photo my own