Any Direction Is Fine

I lately read Alice Robb’s Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey. She whips through a huge amount of research pertaining to various aspects of dreams. I learned that we can dream in non-REM sleep, such as when we’re first falling asleep or near the time we wake in the morning. She also writes that the emotional tone of our dreams tends to improve as the night goes on. We might experience anxiety in earlier dreams and joy or pleasure in later ones. It bodes well when we take action in our dreams as opposed to passively observing.

I was most interested in the chapter on lucid dreaming, of course. The one trait shared by successful lucid dreamers is good dream recall, which can easily be improved by keeping a dream journal, which can be handwritten, typed, or voice recordings. Inspired, I put a pad and pencil underneath both of my pillows for capturing notes during the night. The first morning, I recorded a vague couple of snippets. About four days later, I had a long dream in which, in part, I found myself on a beautifully maintained country estate, so perfect it was like a movie set, with the landscaping largely in shades of gold.

I came upon four people and said, “I’m sorry to interrupt you.” They glared at me, and I realized that all four—men and women—were wearing identical gold-colored wigs that featured pony tails. I forged ahead: “What direction is Stadium from here?” I meant a street in Ann Arbor. One of the people told me the answer, but in such a way that I suspected he might intentionally be leading me astray.

However, I then realized I was dreaming, which meant it didn’t matter if the person had given me the right answer or not. I could walk in any direction and enjoy it, because the destination didn’t matter.

Formerly, I tried to follow Stephen LaBerge’s advice, which is that when you awaken in the night after a dream, you should replay the dream until you have it memorized, and then picture yourself back in that dream becoming lucid, affirming over and over as you fall back to sleep, “Next time I’m dreaming, I will realize I’m dreaming.” The reason this did not work for me is that I literally could never—not once—remember to do it. I would wake up, remember my dream, maybe picture myself once becoming lucid in that dream, and the next thing I knew, I’d be waking up after some other dream.

Alice Robb finally convinced me of the necessity for frequent “reality testing.” This is investigating, during the day, whether one is asleep or awake. It’s best to do it 10 or 12 times a day, or more, perhaps every time you pass through a doorway. There are several ways of doing this. You can count your fingers to see if there are five. In a dream, there usually won’t be, or if there are, if you count them a second time, there will definitely be more than five. (Why not fewer than five? Things in dreams invariably proliferate.)

You can see if it’s possible to push a finger on one hand through the palm of the other hand. If you can’t, you’re awake. You can read some text and then read it again. If you’re asleep and dreaming, it won’t be the same the second time. You can look at basically anything and then look at it again to see if it’s the same or if it has morphed. Alice Robb also writes about meditating before bed. I have been meditating in the morning for a long time, but decided to start doing it at bedtime instead, since becoming a proficient lucid dreamer is pretty much the one and only thing on my list of life goals.