Sleep Dealer

red bridge, the|G|TM, 2009

Hard to believe it's two years since Inception was released. I know what you're thinking - was Cobb still dreaming? Well at this point I'm not sure it's that important or even worth debating, despite my previous intention to write an analysis that really got into the story. In the same way 2001: A Space Odyssey has been interpreted as a metaphor for film-making, Inception was early on described as Christopher Nolan's film about the art of film. The cut to black can be read either way and argued about for all time to the pleasure of Warner's DVD division, either way it marks the end of the film and the end of the film as our shared dream. In Nolan's words (my emphasis):

I put that cut there at the end, imposing an ambiguity from outside the film. That always felt the right ending to me - it always felt like the appropriate "kick" to me.

Regardless of which is the true narrative of Inception, it brought lucid dreaming into the popular consciousness which can still be seen two years on. And two years on I'm marginally closer to lucid dreaming.

One of the first elements that I was able to become aware of was the nature of sight. As a spectacle wearing individual I'm occasionally rendered unable to see whenever I forget my glasses. In a few cases I deliberately do without, usually outdoors because of the brightness. If you asked me to describe the exact forms of the buildings along my route to the local shop or my workplace I could at best provide an approximation - and an approximation is exactly what appears in the dream. It sounds too close to the old factoid about brain usage, but most of what streams in through the optical nerve is dumped into /dev/null. What we consciously see is really a model of expectations created by the mind, and as the same is true in dreams - but it is not a means of attaining lucidity. What is, however, is defied expectations. Although I didn't become lucid, in my case I realised I could see the street in perfect clarity without wearing my glasses. Nonetheless, it was the first useful clue I could use toward that aim.

Amongst the list of recurring elements in my dreams, the breakdown of logic is another important clue - which is similarly a defiance of expectations. Two common recommendations are to check a digital watch and flip a light switch in your dream. Such modern technologies are predicated on logic, something unknown to the deeper strata of the brain. The digital watch method has been successful for me a few times, displaying a random or inconsistent time between glances. The deterioration of logic has also reoccurred when I've been dreaming about work (yes, so sad). Delivering letters requires that a route is followed and that the sequence of mail matches that route. What instead happens and catches my attention is that I become stressed at the complete jumble of addresses that I can't possibly hope to sort out whilst on the street.

Despite such clues successfully leading me on a number of occasions to conclude I have been dreaming (typically only to immediately wake up in excitement), I'm still plagued by doubt. Not by questions of reality, but by questions of irreality. Just as it's possible to have a false awakening, I've come to wonder whether false-lucidity is possible. Like a character in a book realising they're a work of fiction, the realisation is still part of the story. It's possible that I'm simply losing my grip on awareness, but it often appears as if I'm only dreaming of becoming lucid - that the awareness was itself an illusion.

So whilst I haven't been able to hold it together long enough to explore the mindscape like an architect in Inception, I have been able to investigate the act of dreaming. In fact, a month ago I had a dream within a dream - I was in a light sleep dreaming about being in a deep sleep dreaming. I've been shot in the head and realised my consciousness was still intact and therefore not dead. I've also seen snippets of information become subconsciously incorporated into a dream, which is the nearest organic parallel to this image of a human-readable fragment in random access memory. I've even heard music in my dreams, which might be a result of focusing on sound in dreams - mainly the strange noises that come under 'exploding head syndrome'.

Exploring dreams underlines an important lesson about just how easy it is to believe something that isn't true. Critical though has to be learnt because it isn't innate.

[784 ; 1.5]