Lucid and vivid dreams

This post is going to be about lucid dreaming and dreams on the more vivid end of the spectrum basically. A lucid dream is where you become aware that you are dreaming whilst you are dreaming and this in turn changes the quality of your consciousness. Now perhaps a good entry point for a discussion of Lucid dreams would be the need to do reality checks in your ordinary dreams to trigger lucidity.

 Reality checks

There are a number of triggers which I have tried and I will run through them briefly here. First of all I looked at my watch, when I was still wearing a watch in my daily life, and the second hand would be ticking backwards, the face of the watch would be distorted or the watch might have more numbers on its face than it was supposed to have. In one particularly amusing instance of this reality check I looked at a fancier watch I had purchased but my mind was hopelessly unable to conjure up anything that looked like that watch in my dream. Now the watch reality check was the one that I was using the most when I originally started this stuff but I stopped wearing my watch when it stopped working and had to get creative.

Another reality check I started to do was look at the palms of my hands in my dreams. This was something I saw in a mediocre enough film about Lucid dreaming called 'The Good Night'. The film may be mediocre but the technique is not. One of the first times I used that my hands were fine they just appeared to be ultra-lucid as if they had been removed from out of some water or murk of normal dreaming. In another dream where I was stacking a number of reality checks to prolong the lucid dream I tried the hand reality check and my hand began to taper, become distorted or mutated. It was as though part of my hand was closer or further away than the rest of my hand.

Another reality check then would be adjusting the light levels by flicking light switches in a dream. This is a technique I learned from the film 'Waking Life'. It is one of my most commonly used reality checks and perhaps one that I use most often in conjunction with other reality checking techniques. Perhaps the most insane and least encountered reality check for me is that of using a mirror. I have heard it said that what you see in the mirror is yourself and you actually see yourself. The last time I remember using the mirror as a reality check I was in an empty house. Empty houses feature heavily in my dreams particularly in my lucid dreams. According to Jung houses in dreams represent the psyche or the self. When I looked in the mirror then in this empty room I saw multiple people over my shoulder that appeared and disappeared but were never actually behind me in the dream. I saw myself morph so that I perceived myself as tall and distorted. This continued for a time and the effect was like that of staring into different magic carnival mirrors. There were candles in outside of the mirror that were lit but only smoking in the mirror. The reality check is one of the most interesting and makes me wonder, especially when taken together, with the hand reality check in what way the parts of the brain dealing with body checks are affected in the brain. One of my colleagues suggests that he is not prepared to look into a mirror in a dream because he might be scared or shocked by what he might see.

Scope or limitations in dreams

A friend of mine has described his lucid dreams as involving a lot of exciting events like tremendous flights through the sky at high speed and all manner of excitements. Interestingly the lucid dreams that I tend to have seem to be of a different genus. Stephen La Berge one of the biggest names in the study of lucid dreaming suggests that we bring the limitations of our waking life into our lucid dreams with us and my dreams of flight definitely seem to bear this out. My flying in dreams initially started out as a kind of gliding that had to be be preceded by a long run up. In another dream I could fly in a more serious way but only up to the height of buildings. I remember in the dream saying to myself I recognize that this is a limitation that I am placing on my self but that was no good I still remained at the height of the buildings. My Lucid dreams then for the most part tend to be confined to a very small area and I tend to be excited enough by the prospect of manipulating books and pieces of pottery. I spend large enough amounts of time trying to read in dreams. Though I am able to read the words. They are often either nonsensical words in roman alphabet characters, nearly complete words but with crucial letters changed or removed or proper words but in sentences that make no sense.

Hallucination within hallucinations

Dreams are in themselves hallucinations but sometimes in the the dream there will be the experience of hallucinations in the dream. This can be likened to being awake and experiencing hallucinations. In one particular dream where things began to take a turn and what appeared to be an ordinary sort of a dream began to be populated by people with morphing faces. There were giant purple snails on bikes. There was a giant rotting apple in a box. In a field there were people being hanged from a forklift lodged in a tower that looked like it belonged to an old Spanish church. There was a paranoia that people were disguised as other people and morphing. There was a woman with a radio for a head being sawed in half. What I find odd about that whole dreaming segment was the way in which the quality of dreaming so rapidly changed and it is unusual to think that in a state of consciousness already characterized by so many bizarre things that there is a strand of dreaming that is out there even to the dreaming world. To think that a world in  which a space ship can turn into an old college building alternatingly every few seconds and in which there can be simultaneity of multiple events and consciousness would look at an even further removed world as being even more bizarre is something that truly delights me.

Another series of hallucinations which seem to deviate from normal dreaming experiences for me are those of complex auditory hallucinations. In one or two dreams, particularly ones involving dream visitation like feelings, there can be intense auditory or musical hallucinations. In one dream I was held aloft by intense forces of what seemed to be intelligence that manifested itself in the form of beautiful music. It was as though I was being pummelled in mid-air but not hurt. It was just very intense as though I was being assaulted by haunting piano key notes or being assailed by some sort of cosmic intelligence. I also find it interesting that often times these auditory hallucination can have a more intense effect than the visual ones. Perhaps I might have been some sort of sight hallucination chauvinist had it not been for my dreams with sound and my reading of the intensity and effect of auditory hallucinations over visual hallucinations in schizophrenia.

In another lucid dream that I had where I was wandering around a version of my house. After examining books and moving from room to room I decided to leave the front door of the house. Just as I left the house the visual element of the dream collapsed and I could feel the lucidity and the entire dream slipping away from me. It was at that point that I decided to follow the aural aspect of the dream and this actually restored the visual element of the dream and created once again a landscape of ultra-reality. In that new landscape I didn't want to walk up my neigbour's drive because I had no reason to do so and it would be socially awkward otherwise. The thought processes at that point seemed to evidence a level of self-reflection and social judgment high even by lucid dreaming standards. Auditory hallucinations then I recognize as having saved the dream and enhanced the quality of the thought within it.

Houses and water

So Jung has the house as the self and water as representing emotion. In my experience this tends to ring true for my dreams and the dreams my friends have described to me. There was a long enough period where there was deep dark water with scary deep sea fish in it and this for me was like being overwhelmed by emotion whenever I fell into it. I had a series of dreams in which I would fish in a body of water and occasionally catch a fish. The fish for me represented an emotional insight caught from a deep sea of intense emotions and if you were to fall in you were in trouble. More recently I have been able to deal with water in a calmer fashion I have had a series of dreams about trying to cross a lagoon. In one I venture into the water only a few steps. In another I am making my way across but get badly sunburned. In yet another dream I am river walking and climbing through a rapidly running point in the river and stepping barefoot on soft bits of bark and bits of wood. In another dream I dive naked from a diving board despite repeated warnings and miss the pool and land on the concrete. Water definitely seems to represent emotions for me and it was very interesting in a recent dream where the tide was coming in rapidly much more rapidly then it should have done. I have also had at least two boat sinking dreams that I can remember off of the top of my head. There was one in which I was handed over the wheel of a big yacht but it turned quickly from day to night and I crashed or mishandled the boat and it began to sink. The driving of a boat and who is driving brings in added elements of control into the dream. In another boat crashing dream I am in a long slender boat and collide with another boat and am forced under. In that dream it feels as though I gained a moment of lucidity just before I entered the murky water and woke up. It was enough time to prepare myself for underwater demons which did not appear to be there in this instance.

'That is some serious back brain amygdala shit' - As one of my friends once put it when I was describing my water dreams before. I tend to view my dreams in terms of tropes and in a sense I have been able to subvert some of these tropes. It was a lot of fun to subvert the water trope particularly when the sea was reduced to a fish tank which I was able to shake around. My friends have described all manner of water dreams. One described being trapped on a tiny island and being unable to get to the shore with the water rising rapidly. Another described the going to the beach and the sand turning into water. Another described opening a wardrobe and having a body of water fall on them. For me fishing and fishing paraphernalia feature in my dreams and as I have said above I view this as being to do with gathering emotional insight without allowing oneself to be overwhelmed with emotion.

The second thing that I wanted to talk about was the house in the dream. I love the house in the dream because it allows you to experience the self in a way that seems uniquely offered by the house dream. I have talked to a number of friends about the house dream and it also seems to correlate. One friend for example perceived his house as being under attack by insurgents and the house started to defend itself and put up screens and fight its attackers. This seemed to me to relate to his self in his ordinary experience. In my own dreams of houses and room and that type of dream I tend to have a lot of empty rooms with voices without bodies speaking from other rooms. In another house dream I have a house and/or a house/ shop that sells fishing supplies on the edge of a cliff over the sea. The sense of control and autonomy in these dreams can be breathtaking. It can feel in these moments as though one is absolutely in the cockpit of the self. In communication with all the parts of the self. In Jung's dream of house there were different levels each corresponding to different historical periods. The different rooms and levels of ones house seem to connect often to different levels of the mind and self. The basement could be the more unconscious parts of the self. That the rooms are largely empty is often a good thing for me in dreams as these rooms provide places over which you have complete control. 

One very interesting dream I had combined the house with water in the following way. I was with other people doing a controlled flooding of my house. It is very exciting when these symbols actually make some sense because on its face I could ask why would I flood my house with water. When looked at symbolically, however, it is as follows I as allowing myself to experience emotions so that they can clean the self and there will be a purgative effect.

Just to conclude this post I want to stress how powerful these emotions can be and say that there can be substantial carry over into the next day and your waking life. Some of the house and water dreams feel like they are adjusting things inside of me and I sometimes refer to them as 'levelling up' dreams. As mentioned in an earlier post there is increased activation of the limbic system somewhat like the activation of the limbic system in temporal lobe epilepsy. Ernest Hartmann talks of emotion in terms of it being a sort of emotional driving force of dreams and I think that perhaps emotion offers the most meaningful facet of dreaming at times. While the content of dreams can often be quite banal the emotions underpinning them can be of a heightened nature all together. It is as though the plots and facts of the stories are just necessary elements to get across the emotional story. It is as though there is a pre-verbal, wordless language of emotions that has its own contextual consistency. It doesn't need to concern itself with the causality or notions of time that we bother with in every day narratives. The nature of dream emotions and symbols can mean that as little as a lucid dream of reading a book can leave one with a profound series of emotions that can carry well into the next day.