On rare occasion I post my dreams up on my blog - usually when they're not too personal. Just recently my friend David was reading about Lucid Dreaming. There are a few states to dreaming that you can achieve:
- Remember your dreams
- Control your dreams
- Be aware that you are dreaming and have complete control
Now that third point is something I've never done before.. it's called Lucid Dreaming. The idea is simple enough, you figure out within the dream that you're dreaming and you become consciously able to do anything you want. You can change the dream in any way you want. If you don't like the dream, you can dream about something else instead.
Sound too good to be true? Well it's not. They even sell devices that flash light patterns when you enter REM state that you've trained yourself to recognise. Within the dream, these flashes get integrated in strange ways, such as lightning, or a flickering light, or the way your match dances when you light it. It's your job to identify the flashes and realise you're in a dream.
There are other cool things you can use to figure out you're in a dream. You can count your fingers - often you'll get the wrong number. You can check your wrist watch - the time is never the same twice.
The company that makes the light flashing device have a funny story. They have a button on the side of the goggles that makes a beeping sound when you touch it to turn the device off. They kept getting complaints from customers that when they pressed the button, it didn't work! There was no beeping sound. It dawned on them that their customers were pressing the button in their dreams. Fantastic :)
I distinctly remember being able to control my fate in my dreams, but I've only ever achieved lucid dreaming once. It was the weirdest dream I've ever had. I woke up and saw my VCR at the end of the room like normal - but it wasn't my VCR. I knew then that I was dreaming and I woke up.. and saw my VCR at the end of my room - but it wasn't my VCR. This happened three times in rapid succession until I woke up in to reality. It was very creepy, but now I know what was happening.
So my friend David and I are on a quest to master our dreams better. The first step is to remember your dreams. When you remember your dreams you're able to interpret what they were about. There are plenty of online dream interpretation dictionaries/guides online.. they serve as a starting point. But usually you can figure things out yourself unless there is some weird symbolism going on.
We all have dreams we'll remember for the rest of our lives. I remember a terrible nightmare as a child that involved death and murder. I remember seeing a Scrubs episode and being part of it in a rather elaborate dream involving me and Eliot and waterslides between rooms of Sacred Heart hospital. But did you know you dream almost every night? .. here we absorb ourselves in TV - someone elses imagination - when we could be enjoying a more-than-real experience in our head when we sleep every night. It's enough to make you want to get to bed as early as possible.
There are other amazing things you can do in your sleep. Did you know you have an alarm clock in your body? If you tell yourself to wake up at 5am before you go to sleep, there's a high likelihood that you will. Usually this presents itself as excitement, such as christmas time, your birthday or you're about to travel.
The last two nights David and I have been working on remembering our dreams - working on step one. David fell in to the classic trap last night - when he woke up, he convinced himself he'd remember. Woops. The night before last I had a dream about the Coding Contest. Things were vague and I was disoriented when I woke up because I'd woken up on 5am on the dot. So I know now that my internal alarm clock still works well :)
Last night I had a dream about two people getting together. I met some girl and we used magic.. lots of magic (and I don't mean an innuendo, I mean like casting magic spells). We caused some havok and eventually our families got together and both sides discovered the other were also magic users. There was much rejoicing. What was this dream about? My sister got engaged! And two days ago - Sunday - both families got together in (near) full to celebrate. It was fun and fantastic and we all got along really well.
So while I'm not up to the stage of doing more than remembering dreams at this point, at least I'm not having trouble interpreting them... oh.. and they are very entertaining. There were some funny moments in my dream last night - however like most bad jokes, retelling them loses the humor :)