(Dream A Dream A Trance As You Dream) In Trance As Mission

The Listening Room, René Magritte, 1952

More than a decade ago in a hot and stifling home economics class each pixel in my eye went out one by one until my vision faded, my inner ear lost track of balance, and the last thing I could feel was my head painlessly colliding with the floor tiles. I woke up in bed, got up for breakfast and went about the morning routine for school. Then I woke up again in the recovery position on the classroom floor. As I woke I said to the teacher 'I was dreaming' - What I meant was, I thought collapsing was the dream, and the dream was reality. She figured I had dreamt Scotland won the World Cup. I always found dreams interesting like my own personal bizarre little narrative-defying films, which is why I used to keep a dream journal off and on between 2004 and 2008. A few years ago I read about lucid dreaming but largely forgot about it until seeing Inception. Since the start of this month I've been trying, though to no avail as of writing.

On the first night I counted my breaths half-awake as part of the Wake-Induced method. With my eyes closed I drifted off probably losing count more than once along the way; until suddenly I was seemingly accelerated through space to light speed, muscles vibrating. I didn't wake but I remember twice opening my eyes with my heart-rate somewhere in the cardiac arrest range. And then I fell asleep in a pool of sweat.  A few nights later, with the addition of some ambient music to mask the sound of the computer that was on for 713 hours, I managed to reach an oddly familiar state. It's hard to describe in words since it's the feeling of perception - if that makes any sense. Your mind is elsewhere, entirely disconnected. Imagined objects fluctuate in size, large is small and vice versa; a glacial erratic rolls in a broom cupboard. Look at the above painting. The sensation was very familiar. The one time it stands out particularly well in my memory was sometime in the 90s in my old room. I was ill and dropping in and out of sleep through the day. I remember I thought I moved the walls when looking at them, and I remember being in this mental place like a bowling alley. The pins were minuscule dots and slowly rolling down the isle where planet sized spheres. From a birds-eye view my mind watched.

Maybe I did lucid dream as a child without realising it, or without understanding what it was. Apparently children have them all the time. The problem, from an adult's perspective, is maintaining two seemingly contradictory states - consciousness and relaxation. Trying to remain aware whilst simultaneously trying to slide away is quite frustrating for me since I used to and still occasionally have trouble shutting my inner voice up, especially when I'm not exhausted from work or overdosed on caffeine. Because of this I'm instead pursuing the reality-check method whereby constantly questioning whether I'm in reality or a dream should eventually train me to do the same whilst evading Velociraptors, finding myself in my old house, or looking at impossibly large planets and moons in the sky. Animals that have been extinct for 65 million years you'd think would arouse suspicion.

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