Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Am I Just Student, Dreaming I Have Graduated?

"Dreaming is perception unconstrained by sensory input. Perception is dreaming constrained by sensory input."
-Stephen LaBerge

I went to my first Lucid Dreaming class tonight. About 20 of us were there in the classroom waiting, until the instructor arrived ten minutes late, claiming he had just woken up. Since he's a dream researcher, for all we know that could have been true. He did look rather like he had just woken up, but he also looked like that was normal for him. Somewhat haggard but quite animated, he appeared to be just this side of the fine line marking the territory of sanity. His eyes, periodically over-widening with excitement, seemed to tease us by shifting him from one side of the line to the other. An interesting character.

Most of tonight's class was introductory material, and a lot of things that I recognized from his guest lecture in Sleep and Dreams a couple years ago. So it was sort of interesting, but nothing very unfamiliar. That's too bad, since we aren't having class next week (he'll be out of town) so things won't really get going until mid-April. But after that it should get better. The idea is to spend the first hour each week with a lecture sort of class about dream research. Then the second hour will be for actually learning to have lucid dreams, talking about our dreams, and things like that. So I think it will be good.

It was also fun to go be a student again. I even rode my bike over to campus, just like old times. And I'll get to do it again tomorrow, for West Coast Swing. Fun fun.

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