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.

Nice Story, But What Does it Mean?

How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster is a book that I wish I had read back in 12th-grade English (a class which, had it been 11th-grade English, probably would have severely affected my college possibilities). It's a great introduction to understanding and appreciating the symbolism in literature, and it even made me want to go back and re-read things like Song of Solomon or The Odyssey that I found so torturous six years ago.

I liked Foster's approach to teaching. He has a lot of fairly absolute statements, implying that X always means Y, which can seem a bit extreme at times. But I think he also makes it clear that he's just doing this to get his points across. He reminds us that really, he's just showing us some tools here, and we can do what we want with them. I liked this passage in particular:

We tend to give writers all the credit, but reading is also an event of the imagination; our creativity, our inventiveness, encounters that of the writer, and in that meeting we puzzle out what she means, what we understand her to mean, what uses we can put her writing to. Imagination isn't fantasy. That is to say, we can't simply invent meaning without the writer, or if we can, we ought not to hold her to it. Rather, a reader's imagination is the act of one creative intelligence engaging another.

To me, this relates to dream interpretation, as well as reading literature. I've never been a fan of things like dream "dictionaries" that purport to give you specific meanings for specific symbols in your dreams. While this may be useful for pointing out some general cultural associations you may not be entirely aware of, it is not as valuable for dreams going on inside your head as it would be for literature going on out there in the world. The most important thing is to consider what the symbols mean to you, what your gut reaction is to them, and any parallels you see in them with your own life. I was glad to see a little bit of that in this book as well.

Foster also has a very interesting chapter on the concept of all literary works really being fundamentally about the same story. He describes it in terms of cultural archetypes and myths going back before history, that we all draw on when we create works of art and literature. I still feel like the "overall human story" is probably big enough to contain many smaller stories, so I'm not really sure that it's not basically just a terminology distinction. But that's probably something that bears more thought on my part, and I appreciated the fact that he discussed that a bit as a way to put the rest of the book in context.

Anyway, I'm very glad to have read this, given that I'm starting to read a lot more fiction again. It added a huge stack of books to my reading list, though (which was already unmanageably long). But that's okay.

Shakespearean Swing

I saw Ram's Head's production of Kiss Me, Kate tonight. Getting to see people in Elizabethan garb doing swing dancing probably would have been a good enough reason to go see it all on it's own, but the entire show was wonderful. (Though I must say that General Harrison Howell really should have gotten more songs.) Hooray for Trang and Kari and Meg and Dave and Eric and Ben and everyone else.

Clash of the Swings

At the Swing Kids dance last night I danced a couple West Coast Swings with Susanna, who's also taking the Thursday night class that I'm in. I was actually kind of surprised that, after only three classes, we already know enough to dance some complete dances and have fun with it. I don't know if I'm looking very west-coasty yet, though. I think style is going to be at least as much, if not more, of a learning project as the steps. Right now I have a hard time keeping the Lindy Hop out of the way, because it's so easy for me to slip into that. But something I noticed last night surprised me, which was that West Coast was actually creeping into my Lindy Hop a little bit as well, in the form of some very slotted swing-outs. That's not a huge deal except for the fact that, each time I noticed it, I would get temporarily confused and fumble something up until I remembered exactly what I was doing. Oh well. It was a fun dance last night, and I think it's promising that I'm starting to enjoy West Coast already.