About a month ago, I wrote an application for my Treo called The Lucidizer. Periodically, during daylight hours, The Lucidizer sets off a vibrate alarm and displays a dialog box that says “You Are Awake.”
The point of this is to remind me to check whether or not I am awake. Once this becomes a habit, I am more likely to check whether I’m awake when I am actually dreaming.
A few days ago, the morning of July 1st, it worked. I was dreaming about playing golf. Since I’m not a golfer, this dream wasn’t as enjoyable as you might otherwise think.
It was a classic dream - I was about to tee off, I grabbed my driver, and as I walked toward the tee, I noticed that my driver was cracked in half, totally useless. I knew I had a 3 wood in my bag that I could use instead. I walked back to my bag, looked in it, and it was empty.
So far, the dream had all the characteristics of an “oh no, I’m not wearing pants” kind of dream. But, thanks to The Lucidizer, something else happened. I was, of course, shocked that my golf bag was empty. But then I realized that it is exactly this type of thing that happens all the time in dreams - things change from moment to moment in surprising ways. As I stood there staring at my empty bag, I decided I was probably dreaming.
I still wasn’t quite sure I was dreaming, and I didn’t yet have any control over what was happening. But then I tried something. I decided I shouldn’t do anything too crazy or embarrasing, like summon a flying dragon, or leap into a canyon or anything, just in case I really was at a real golf course. So I chose to run.
It worked. I ran, and suddenly I had full awareness of my entire surroundings. It felt like breaking out of a shell. And, as it turns out, running while dreaming is just as fun as flying or anything else. It felt really, really cool. I can still remember what it felt like, a kind of total weightlessness, no heaviness of a physical entity, yet still able to perform physical feats like running. It was pure brain-stuff - interacting with my brain’s model of the world, the way it understands movement, separate from any sensorial feedback.
At that point in the dream, some other parts of my brain must have started to notice that something strange was going on, and I started to wake up. I tried spinning my arms around in big windmill circles, and that helped a little bit (and was pretty fun to do), but that was it - I woke up.
The next morning, it wasn’t until I was in the shower that I remembered the whole thing, and then I could remember the sensation of running in my dream. It reminded me of the importance of being able to remember dreams - after all, even if I end up summoning a dragon or jumping into a canyon in a dream, I won’t know about it unless I remember it the next day.
It’s been almost a week since this first success, but The Lucidizer is working. I also have some new ideas for the interface - instead of simply saying “you are awake”, it can do a random exercise, such as show a number of objects, blank the screen, then show that SAME number of objects. Or, show a word, blank the screen, then show the same word. In a dream, the second item shown would most likely be different. If I can dream about The Lucidizer going off in my pocket, I’ll be back in control - then maybe I can work on my golf game while I sleep.
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