Lucid Dreams (A Parenthetical Road Trip Report)
2006/02/09
I suppose I've always been a bit of a solitary adventurer. When I was a vigorous young man I would sometimes go winter camping by myself, hauling 60 pounds of tent, stove, food, clothes, skis, etc, off to Manning or Strathcona or Garibaldi park. As it was winter, darkness would fall around 5:00 and it would start getting quite cold around 7:00 or so. There's nothing much for the dark, cold hours other than to snuggle on down into the sleeping bag and stay there for 12 or 14 hours waiting for dawn and tomorrow's adventures. When a person gets too much sleep - say 10+ hours a night - dreams can become spectacular. I always loved and looked forward to this. Hugely grand, odd, epic dreams would unfold in vivid colour and would be firmly etched in memory come morning. I remember a few of these in detail to this day.
One day on this current road trip I had soup and a Leo around 2:00, got dragged into another beer with some local school teachers around 3:00 and headed for a nap at 4:00. I expected to be down about an hour or so, but was disconcerted to find it was 10:00 pm when I awoke. It was a small town, completely shut down at that hour. There really wasn't much to do but go back to bed, which created a total of about 13 hours of sleep.
Robyn, my dear daughter who has been to Thailand before, came into the room in the middle of the night and we chatted a bit. She mentioned how pleased she was to be back in Thailand. I offered the opinion that she wasn't really here, that in fact I was simply having a lucid dream and she was a manufactured part of it. She accepted this quite calmly, and I suggested that her not finding the notion completely absurd tended to confirm its validity. I then half awoke to find myself alone in the room thus confirming to myself that I did indeed have a lucid dream.
I headed back down into sleep with the express purpose of seeing if I could exercise control and choice within a second dream. Usually in dreams one is a helpless observer, scenarios arise seemingly on their own, and irrational changes of venue and circumstance occur frequently. In dreams that I am here calling "lucid", one has control and volition. Choices can be made, and the dream's content can be willfully directed. Such dreams are very rare, but I have had a couple before in my life. I experimented in this second dream and confirmed that I could stabilize the scenario, make choices, and affect the events and direction of the dream. I brought this discovery, or confirmation, back up into half-awake reality and immediately wanted to dive back in and experiment as to what the limits might be, to find out what comprises boundaries when normal constraints do not pertain.
I slipped into my third lucid dream of the series and created an unflappable character, one who could not be perturbed by any events and could never harbour an ill thought against anyone, no matter what. I then proceeded to torment, irritate, and be generally hostile to this poor creation of mine. Now this may sound like an odd and unpleasant choice of experiment to make, but it is the one chosen, so it is the one reported here. I would squirt water in his ear, poke him with sticks, and simply direct ill will towards him which he would be aware of (because I chose for him to be aware of it). The result? I felt disliked, and worthy of that dislike. I don't like being disliked. I felt bad about what I was doing. But note that I was in fact not disliked. My subject was designed such that he could not respond in that fashion. Note that it was I who felt bad due to my own internal programming, not that of my perennially cheerful subject. I surfaced from this 3rd round of lucid dreaming with the awareness that I had explored limits and had found that we carry our limits within ourselves. The boundaries I had crossed were my own. They were entirely internal, and were not imposed by the external world. That was a very interesting result. It was illuminating to experience this reality so directly in a circumstance where external boundaries could be removed by simple choice of will.
I dove down into two other lucid dreams after that. They were just play, but I found the warm-water oyster farming to be particularly good fun.
What's the point of all this? I believe I have taken a unique opportunity to demonstrate experimentally that our limits do not result from our inability to manipulate, control or modify the external world. Acquiring super-powers or all the money in the world can not change things fundamentally for us. Our limits are mostly internal and are circumscribed by our fears, perceptions, beliefs, attitudes and character. If we wish to overcome the limitations we find in our lives, we can do so only by modifying these aspects of our internal landscape.
There was an alternative travel guide to Mexico popular in the late 60s and early 70s that
put all this much more succinctly in a slogan on its cover:
"Wherever you go, there you are".