Lucid Dreaming
"You're on a first name basis with lucidity, little friend! I have to call it Mr. Lucidity, and that's no good in a pinch."Here’s why I don’t think that Leonardo DiCaprio and his merry band of dream thieves could successfully Inception me – I watched the movie, and as far as I’m concerned, the dreams they were whipping up were way too realistic. If I ever found myself in a rainy city in the middle of a Heat style shootout between two groups of armed men with physics and gravity in full operation, I feel like I’d know right away that it wasn’t one of my dreams because the things happening in it were things that, on some level, made a degree of rational sense and were possible in the real world.
Even when Inception did get weird, with big sections of Paris folding up onto themselves like some sort of briefcase sized travel Paris and people doing kung fu in zero gravity, it was still way more normal than any of my dreams. At the very least, it was weird in cool ways, unlike my dreams, which tend to be weird in creepy, Lars von Trier art film sort of ways.
Post Inception I’ve been interested in doing some lucid dreaming myself, so I Googled ‘How To Lucid Dream’ in hopes of getting some pointers. The first thing I found out is that wanting to know how to lucid dream is like wanting to know how to date beautiful women – if you Google the question, you’ll come up with multiple tutorials you have to pay for and a WikiHow entry that was clearly written by a 16 year old.
The second thing I found out is that if you want to be able to be bold and powerful master of your dream world, you have to be fully willing to make a fool of yourself in the real one. Since dreams are cobbled together from the stuff we do on a regular basis in real life, you have to integrate various dream tests into your everyday existence so that eventually you’ll remember to do them in your dreams. Dream tests include reading and then re-reading a block of text to see if the words have changed or leaning on a wall to see if you fall through it, and they are to be performed every time something bizarre happens in your life that gives you reason to think you may be in a dream.
When your job is to sit and watch video footage of a team of supposed psychics wandering around in the dark trying to talk to ghosts, you find yourself doing a lot of dream tests. Mine is to pick up a pen and drop it to see if it falls and bounces the right way. Of course, given my nonexistent understanding of physics, the pen could explode or turn into a unicorn and I’d still probably consider it a normal reaction.
The other method suggested to start lucid dreaming is to keep a dream journal in which you record the goings on of your dreams as soon as you wake up. The better you’re able to remember your previous dreams, they say, the better you can recognize common traits within your dreams and then realize that you’re dreaming. Here, let’s analyze some entries in my dream journal together and see what we come up with:
-My parents and I were staying in a hotel in the middle of the forest when a grizzly bear broke into our room. We all played dead. It spent several minutes sniffing me and licking my face, then went over to the wall and destroyed a painting of a beach identical to one my grandparents had in their house in the late 1990s, then left. We all got up and quickly checked out of the hotel.
I’ve been playing a lot of Red Dead Redemption recently, and late in the game you start to encounter grizzly bears in the wilderness who are pretty much the Old West equivalent of big furry Death Stars. The experience of walking through the virtual forest, minding my own business, and then being sent to the ‘GAME OVER’ screen courtesy of a big rampaging bear has instilled in me a suitable fear of the creatures. I’m not sure why the savage beasts hate my parents or my relatives’ artwork so much, though.
-I was at a vacation house somewhere in Washington. It was a massive building, so big that there were multiple smaller houses built within it. Somewhere in there I bumped into The Ex Girlfriend’s father, who started making me some sort of drink involving white wine/champagne. As I drank, I read a recipe I found on the table for some sort of onion dip.
Onion dip is the de-facto dip of the Capps family; if at any point in my life I’ve been eating a non-salsa dip, it’s probably been onion dip, save for my recently invented Battledip Galactica. Also, I drank with The Ex Girlfriend’s father on more than one occasion – although knowing what I know now about that particular gene pool I’d probably turn down any drinks for fear of getting roofied and having the rest of my DVDs and sweatshirts stolen. As far as the house, my family has been vacationing in Washington for as long as I can remember, so I suppose in my mind it’s earned a reputation as a place that there would be vacation homes – potentially even ones so big that they have smaller homes inside them.
-I was attending a fundraiser at a fancy old mansion when I met Richard Nixon. He had been accompanying Mrs. Nixon while she showed guests around, but I guess he got bored and slipped away and bumped into me. We sat in the kitchen, eating leftover take out French fries from a tinfoil container, and he told me stories about his career. I took it all with a grain of salt, though, given his penchant for lying.
I can probably directly attribute this to the massive amounts of Mad Men I’ve been watching recently. However, out of virtually everyone involved with that show, Richard Nixon is probably the last person I’d want to meet.
Truman Capps hasn’t had any lucid dreams yet, but as soon as he does he’s going to be watching Firefly season 2 all night long.