Like Dreaming, Without the Sleep

It turns out that MirrorMask is probably about the best book to read in the middle of the night when you can't sleep. Neil Gaiman manages to capture the feel of dreamland incredibly well. The matter-of-fact mix of the creepy, bizarre and hilarious, along with just enough narrative cohesion to make it an actual story, seems to hit the nail right on the head. It makes for a fascinating hour or so of reading. I could probably describe it more eloquently, but it's late and I think I'm actually about ready to go back to sleep now. I wonder what my dreams will be like?

Seeing and Dreaming

I recently finished The Onion Girl, by Charles de Lint. I think high school was the last time I had read any of his stuff, and I'd almost forgotten how much I like his books. My favorite thing about them is how beautifully he integrates the world of magic with the "World As It Is," the real world. He shows you how magic, fairies and the like are not just fantasy but are actually all around us. Jilly Coppercorn is an artist in the Newford books (and the central character of The Onion Girl) who draws and paints the things that she sees and other people miss:

"Do you have to be magic yourself to see them?"
Jilly shook her head. "You just have to pay attention. If you don't, you'll miss them, or see something else—something you expected to see rather than what was really there. Faerie voices become just the wind, a bodach, like this little man here"—she flipped to another page and pointed out a small gnomish figure the size of a cat, darting off a sidewalk—"scurrying across the street becomes just a piece of litter caught in the backwash of a bus."
(page 141)

It reminds me of learning about "top-down processing" in a cognitive psych class somewhere back in college. Perceiving what you expect and what makes sense in the context can be very efficient at times, since you don't have to take in every single detail. But what do we miss by doing that?

A lot of this book also takes place in manidò-akì, the Dreamlands. This is a place inhabited by various spirits since before the world began, but it is also continuously being created by human imaginations. I love this because imagination and creativity are huge in my conception of magic. One of the characters, Sophie, created an entire city called Mabon, beginning with her daydreams as a child and continuing through her life in what she called "serial dreams" before she realized that it all went beyond simple dreams.

It began with Mr. Truepenny and his curious shop in which you could find all the books that authors hadn't gotten around to writing, with a gallery in the back that held the same never-to-be-seen treasures of the great artists....
She daydreamed the shop and its contents with such clarity that her time spent imagining them was as real to her as the world around her when she was awake. And slowly a city built up around that shop. First it was only the street outside as seen from inside, then the buildings on either side of Mr. Truepenny's establishment and across the street, finally the city blocks that started up on either end of the street. The city grew and spread out, no longer under her control, its existence fueled now by other dreamers who came and stayed and added their own ideas and considerations.
(page 316)

So in addition to making me want to pay more attention to the world around me, this book also makes me want to start paying attention to my dreams more, and start working on lucid dreaming again. There are so many worlds to explore....

First Lucid Dream

I remember going through about three different dream sequences last night, all of which contained plenty of clues that I was dreaming, of course, though I didn't catch any of them until the end of the last one. I was walking home at the end of the dream, across a large field. I don't know what tipped me off -- all the people in Renn Faire outfits, or the giant green statue pulling the bell in a clock tower, or what -- but somehow I realized I must be dreaming. As soon as I thought that I looked around myself in excitement, but moved so fast that I woke myself up.

My alarm went off about then so I got up, but then decided to put it on snooze and lay back down. As I was dozing off again, my bed started shaking. Not like an earthquake, but more like one of those vibrating alarm clocks, only big enough to shake my entire bed. That seemed pretty strange, plus it occurred to me that I never use the snooze button on weekdays, so I think the combination of those two things clued me in to the fact that I had just had a false awakening. I moved a pillow aside to check my alarm clock and the time was 7:50, about right for having hit the snooze button a few minutes ago. So I covered it up briefly and then looked again, now it was four-something, plus I realized that the clock was on the right side of my bed instead of the left. So I did it once more, deliberately choosing to see it as 1:51, and that's what it changed to.

So now I know I'm dreaming. I go back to the field that I left in the last dream, and it's filled with random dream characters there to welcome me, though they're all sort of cartoon-style people. Everything's a little blurry too, and I'm having trouble figuring out how to focus my eyes. I can see things with my eyes closed or half-closed, but not very well, and I feel like opening my eyes will wake me up. Unfortunately, I'm also somehow taking a bird's eye view of the scene, rather than being directly in it, so I'm getting more distanced from the dream, which doesn't help. Pretty soon everything faded out and I woke up (for real this time). It turned out to still be 15 minutes before my alarm would go off, so I just stayed awake and jotted down some notes on the dream.

So anyway, not much there, but it was something. I'm making progress at least, and that's exciting.

Have You Done a Reality Test Today?

In class tonight, Dr. LaBerge wore an "Oneironauts" t-shirt (oneironauts being people who travel in dreams). On the back, it said:

HAVE  YOU  DONE  A
A REALITY TEST TODAY?
1 - 800 - GO - LUCID

Reality tests are a quick and easy way to tell if you're dreaming. The most common test is to find something to read (a clock, sign, book cover, whatever) then read it, look away, then read it again. In a dream, it will nearly always be different the second time. Of course, he tells us this and then goes and wears a shirt that just messes everything up. It may be more obvious here on a screen in smaller type, but everyone in class had to read his shirt about 5 times before we figured out what it actually said. (Read it slowly, word by word, if you don't get it right away.)

One suggestion for inducing lucid dreams is to get in the habit of performing regular reality checks when you're awake, with the idea that, sooner or later, you'll do one in a dream and realize that you're dreaming. Apparently that's not really a very efficient way to do it though, since it takes a lot of practice to build the habit. Plus, once you're dreaming, there's usually plenty of other weird things going on to tip you off about it. The real trick is to remember to notice that you're dreaming. Unfortunately, simply remembering to do things in the future is very hard to do. Our homework assignment for the week is this: every time we walk through a doorway, we will remember to touch the door frame on the side with the hinges. Sounds simple. I remembered both doors on the way out the classroom, and forgot both doors coming back into my house and my room. Darn.

Dreaming the Future, part II

A couple nights ago I had a dream about my friend and dance partner Jessica. I haven't seen her for probably a year, and it's been far too long since I've sent her an email or anything. Anyway, the gist of my dream is that she came back to the Bay Area and I was very glad to see her and to get a chance to dance with her again.

However, the really interesting thing about the dream happened after I woke up. It occurred to me that I really ought to write to her, see how she's doing and all that. I kept reminding myself to do that all day yesterday, though I never quite got around to it (busy day). So I was going to do it for real today, but guess what I found in my inbox this afternoon? An email from Jessica, completely out of the blue, saying she'll be back in the area for the summer and asking if I'd like to sign up for Waltz Weekend with her. Wow.

I think this is probably a good example to go along with my previous dream post, concerning knowledge of the future. A dream like this seems rather like a prediction of the future, or would have, if I had been trying to interpret it that way. But really, it's mostly present knowledge. Since it was only two nights ago, I'm sure Jessica already knew she'd be up here for the summer, and she most likely was already thinking about Waltz Weekend, and realizing it was full for women so she would need a partner to register. So that information existed already, though the question still remains of how exactly it got to me.

All I can say is, planetary alignment or whatever, there's definitely some sort of dream energy going around these days.

Dreaming the Future

At the Fletchers' last weekend, I talked a bit about dreams with John after he heard I was taking the Lucid Dreaming class. I mentioned at one point that I knew someone who had told me of a prophetic dream she once had. The details of the dream are uninteresting (her car was in the shop and she dreamt correctly of the part that was broken and the price to replace it, before finding it out the next day). The fact that it happened at all was fascinating. But John seemed to find the idea worrying as well, saying that if such things were true then it would have tremendous implications for the (non-)existence of free will.

To me, though, that doesn't seem to be a problem. Rabbi David J. Wolpe (in his book Why Be Jewish?) said that "Prophets do not foretell the future; rather, they see deeply into the present." I'd say that's the approach I take to thinking about this kind of thing.

Let's say I tell you what I'm going to do for the rest of the evening. I'm going to finish this blog entry, call my sister on the phone, and later on watch Whose Line is it Anyway? while I work out. This information will probably be a bit outdated by the time you read this, but you can see the concept. This is the present giving you very clear information about the future. It's not perfect, of course. I could get hit by a meteor, which would cancel the whole thing, or I could simply decide to read instead of watching TV. But it would be perfectly reasonable to trust me and assume that in all likelihood things would happen more or less as I described. And nobody's free will is affected by this at all.

So I believe this is the kind of knowledge that people get when they have prophetic dreams, or when they obtain information about the future in other ways. It isn't perfect or exact, and it doesn't plunge us all into determinism. But it could still provide enough information to be useful and/or interesting. Of course, it would raise lots of other questions as well. If you find that some of your dreams are predictive, you'd have to learn how to tell them apart from the ones that aren't. Notice also that I'm leaving aside the whole question of where this knowledge even comes from, simply because I have no clue. I think it would have a lot more to do with "seeing deeply," as Wolpe says, than with simply being told things, but there are probably lots of little mysteries inside us that would affect things like this.

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.

Googling

Today was my first day as an official, permanent employee. Ever, actually. Anywhere. This is the first job I've ever had that was really "for keeps," and not a summer internship or a temp job. Well, I suppose "permanent" means something rather different now than it did fifty years ago but still, it's pretty cool. The foreseeable future is looking good, at least, and I'm really happy to be working at such a great place, with great people. Congratulations also to fellow newbies Kimmy and Biz. Yay us!

This might be an interesting time to share a dream I had a while back, seeing as how dream interpretation can be rather easier in retrospect. This was about a year and a half ago, when I was applying for a different job at Google. I dreamt that I was sitting at the entrance to a building selling tickets to a line of people, when a man came up to me and asked if he could get $100 cash advance on his credit card. Somehow I must have been able to do that, because I said "Sure," and gave it to him. He handed it right back to me, along with the credit card, which was marked with the Google logo, saying "It's a gift — compliments of Google recruiting."

Of course, this got my hopes up quite a bit, so I was rather disappointed when I didn't get the job. But it gets more interesting when you look at what's happened over the last year and a half. First, notice the contrast of the two main symbols in this dream: cash and a credit card. Both represent the same sort of thing (being able to buy stuff) but in different ways. The cash is finite and ready for immediate, one time use. The credit card represents much greater purchasing power that is also more sustainable, since you can use it over and over. But it also has the connotation of delay, since you don't actually shell out the money for a purchase untill a few weeks later when you get the bill.

So then it turned out that I got a temp job at Google for a couple months early this year. I was making some money, though not a whole lot, and only for a short amount of time. I got to work at Google, though, which is cool in and of itself. But now, after several more months, I'm back, and I'm permanent this time. The temp job was cash; this is the credit card. Delayed gratification. Pretty cool.

So anyway, was that a prophetic dream? Well, back in May of 2002 I certainly couldn't have predicted how things would work out. It does seem like a nice symbolic foreshadowing, though, once you go back and stick an explanation on it. So you can just believe whatever you want about it.

Daydreams

For some reason recently I've been paying more attention to the subject of daydreams. By far the biggest imagination-topics for me are music and dance, though I suppose that's maybe no huge surprise. In my head I can evoke the entire range of human emotion on a huge selection of instruments. It reminds me a little of the pianist character in An American in Paris, and the daydream sequence to Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F. But it rarely involves pieces of music that I actually play, or even recognize. It's more frequently improvised magic that I would never be able to replicate in real life, which is probably why I have such a hard time composing. I can have a gorgeous feeling and concept in my head and yet have no clue how to translate it into actual notes. I suppose I need to get better at improvising in order to get better at composing. But that's a tangent.

And then there's dancing, which again involves music, of course. What makes my inner dancing so fascinating is not so much any particular moves so much as a complete and total integration with the music. It's as if the music and the dance are created in unison, from a single thought. Tango is excellent for this, though swing and waltz are right up there as well. Having a partner that I feel close to and connected with is also essential, and everything ultimately just ties into one beautiful, inextricable synthesis of people, music and motion. That's the ideal that I keep in my mind, and all the best dances of my life are ones that inch me a little bit closer to it.

If I extend the general theme of my daydreams, I see that really they are almost all about creativity. I've had far more ideas for drawings, paintings and craft projects than I will ever actually create, but it's fun sometimes just to be an artist in your mind, even if your creations are never brought to life. I also imagine myself writing long, thought-provoking, witty blog entries (I'll try to let you know if I come up with one), or even fiction, which is a much farther leap from reality for me. But music and dance are the big ones, the ones that can literally make my heart beat faster just from the magic I create in my head. It's the creative force behind it all that makes it magic.

In short -- concepts are good, but I'm still working on implementation. Probably always will be. :-)