Over The Horizon Radar

I FAIL (Cropped), Prij, 2006

One of the reasons I've always advocated media studies, despite not having taken it myself, is to promote critical thinking - especially with regards to advertising and journalism. It's important to doubt what you're presented with, be it a brand of aftershave or a superbeing in the sky. Without free thought we become consumers, like farm animals fattening up to be led round the back and given a second mortgage. As a free thinker I hate to see lies and deceptions being mindlessly accepted by people. More so when it's me. In my pursuit of lucid dreaming there's nothing more annoying than not dreaming, than later remembering you did. Across three nights at the start of this month I missed three opportunities to become lucid.

In the first dream I had a false awakening and was presented with something I knew was not true and I successfully recognised that. However, I reasoned that I was being tricked into believing I was dreaming (a reverse Inception?) and proceeded to perform the finger-through-hand reality check in order to prove I was awake. It correctly proved (in narrative) that I was awake. To practise that reality check and see it fail was extremely frustrating. The following night I dreamt I was on what alternated between being a train and a plane. With obviously fictional characters present amongst the passengers, I had a conversation about lucid dreaming with the two women in the row behind. I even talked about reality checks but didn't perform one, perhaps because of the previous night's failure.

Having seen the hand-check fail on its own, I added two other checks - digital watches and reading. Digital watches will throw up random numbers or symbols between glances; and text is notoriously hard to read, often morphing on attempt as I found in the third dream. The next night, I was in my local shop trying to read the terms and conditions of a prize offer on a bottle. This was a non-linear nightmare. I struggled like a child learning to read. Eyesight has always been an issue for me in dreams, I recall many in which I'm near-blind. The text rearranged until I managed to "read" it, starting with the middle and end paragraphs and then the first. It wasn't so much that I read it, than I knew it - the words were not on the bottle, they were in me and I was projecting them by looking at it. That would be the only way to describe it.

Interestingly, although the English was a murky half-remembered affair, I can quite clearly recall some of the Greek and Arabic text that also appeared. I imagine this is because I can't speak the languages that use those respective scripts and so interpret them as discrete symbols. I can easily transliterate Greek and Cyrillic, and less "fluently" Arabic (I most clearly remember focusing on Arabic Zayin), and Kana. In the case of the Japanese scripts, I used to buy imported Japanese Pokemon cards from a local game shop and found an IME on Windows 98 which I used to translate the names. My Flickr screename actually comes from katakana written on a business card I found in a dream.

Though I have yet to become lucid in a dream, I have for some years wielded a degree of control in nightmares - at the moment of maximum stress I can pause or quit a nightmare. This often manifests itself as a joypad in my hands. I recall playing a survival horror game a long time ago and quitting out of fear before I could be killed. I had maybe a dozen dreams/nightmares stemming from that game but the idea of exiting the circumstances of my fear was also incorporated. From that point on I could often halt a nightmare before, for example, being stabbed. Much like a rollercoaster, you get an adrenaline rush without actually nearing death. Even without control over nightmares, you can sleep safe in the knowledge that you cannot die in your dreams. Without any experience to draw on, being killed will either wake you up from the stress or change the dream. Of course, that doesn't mean you won't go through your death throes and it'll all seem real, much to your horror.

Still, I want to see what architecture I could raise in my dreams.

[745]