Posts Tagged ‘lucid dreaming’
Old Attic
A discussion in my online community about lucid dreaming triggered a dream experience for me that occurred early Thursday morning. It has been a long, long time since I realized within a dream that I was dreaming.
In this instance, my memory of the beginning of the dream included a vision of what looked like the attic door of our old farmhouse. It had a padlock on it, but the latch was open. I approached the door and reached for the knob, and it opened! Inside, instead of the storage shelves I remember, the room was furnished like a 1950s living room with a television on spindle legs. I was able to step in and walk a short circle around the room, noticing a shiny black grand piano on my left as I turned toward the door again. As I passed it, I wondered if it would make a sound if I pressed the keys, so I stepped back to get in front of it, and as I reached for the keys, the piano had morphed into an organ. I noticed there were both yellow and white keys, and I pressed a couple in succession. It didn’t make a piano sound, but it produced tones I was able to hear, soft like an unplugged electric guitar.
1967 Aerial View, house and barns
In my lucid excitement over being in our old house, I wondered if I would be able to explore other rooms and go downstairs. Unfortunately, the sound of a siren (unknown whether actual or dreamt) changed the focus of the dream to a new scenario. I followed the new thread, which had nothing to do with the farmhouse anymore, and enjoyed a continued sense of lucidity throughout the rest of the dream.
Lucid dreaming allows for more controlled decisions within the situations that arise. There is a rewarding sense of superiority that arises in knowing you are dreaming while experiencing your dream.
The feeling I remember most from the whole dream was the big thrill of the moment I “saw” that I was in our old farmhouse, a dwelling that was demolished in 1969. I have a suspicion that it was that rush that triggered the slight transition to being able to sense that I was dreaming. It’s too bad I didn’t have a chance to revisit more of the house.
Of course, it being a dream, who knows what I would have discovered in the other rooms. The dreamed attic certainly didn’t bear any similarities to what it really looked like behind that door.
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Sleeping Well
It’s one of those days. I can’t help it. When nothing specific has happened, it’s as if nothing but dreams start bubbling up in my head and flowing out of my fingers onto the keyboard. I suppose it doesn’t help that I gave in to an urge to rewatch the insane Steven Conrad dark-comedy-spy-drama series, “Patriot” last night. A lot of this series is like a bad dream.
Rewatching a much-loved television series is like visiting with old friends you haven’t seen in a long while. It’s why we returned to the beginning of “Reservation Dogs” after finishing the last season. We missed all the characters.
I’m wondering if the spy movie, “Argylle” might have triggered my memories of the “Patriot” series. I understand these shows aren’t for everyone, and I don’t know what my appreciation for them says about me beyond my comfort with dark humor, but they seem to ring some pleasure bells in my head.
Yesterday, I allowed myself to fade into a mid-day slumber in the recliner and dreamed I was floating with a life vest in some water and trying to answer a question Cyndie had asked me from her seat in a low-riding boat. As I attempted to answer I found myself sinking below the surface and I couldn’t do anything about it. My eyes wouldn’t open and my hands and feet wouldn’t move.
I thought to myself, “If I could just open my eyes…” but I couldn’t because I was sleeping at the time. And that is what woke me. My ‘dream self’ began to recognize that my ‘real self’ was asleep. I find moments of lucidity in dreams to be a gift.
Sleeping well enough to enjoy my dreams is also a gift. I do not take for granted my good fortune of having cultivated good sleep habits. I owe a lot of my sleeping success to the information I learned in Matthew Walker’s book, “Why We Sleep – Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.” I highly recommend it!
Since good sleep is one of the more important aspects of optimal health, it is something of a chicken-and-egg dilemma. There is a positive feedback loop in that good health allows for good sleep and getting good sleep is high up on the list of healthy things we can do for ourselves.
If you are out of sync, for either health or sleep, I don’t know if one is solvable before the other. Which comes first?
Don’t bother pondering the question. We can’t lose if we set our sights on striving for both at the same time!
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Relative Something 