Fear of Heights

28/10/2015: 24 hours later....
IMAGE: LeArchitecte

I sat down last night to meditate, and as my thoughts started to silence a powerful memory arose within me: it was the dream I had the night before. This happens not infrequently - strong emotional flashbacks of forgotten past dreams, it has always just been one of those oddities of meditation that I accepted. It is rare however to have a flashback to something to immediate, perhaps because my dream recollection is usually too good to present the situation. Of course, once that initial seed of a memory became conscious I was virtually free to recreate the whole dream from memory, allowing emotions to give rise to vivid images and so on and so forth until I was back in the world of my own creation, once again.

The dream itself began - or so I recall - exploring the basement of an old soviet-era building, as part of a museum tour. I walked past a strange boiler room chamber, that was welded and bolted shut, and guide informed me this was the historical site of a mass atrocity, perhaps where political prisoners were tortured and executed by some exalted leader a generation past. A mixed feeling of terror and excitement arose in me, as I contemplated both the brutality and barbarity of the location whilst curiously wondering what lay behind the bolted door, in the now sealed depths of the construction itself.

We ventured out of the basement and into the ground level of the building, and at this point I can say that I am reminded why I have such a love affair with my unconscious mind: I emerged into the cavernous shell of an old brick and stone building, perhaps like an 18th Century railway depot or an old naval collage, which was gutted and hollow and overgrown with trees and forest like an old Angkor ruin. Except the scale was absolutely gargantuan - the foyer area was the size of a football oval and the structure just went up and up for thousands of meters, its hollow windows open to sky and breeze, with the occasional patch of climbing moss or tree protruding through. The narrative of the dream, or perhaps the actual in dream narrator/tour guide (is there much of difference?) informed us all that this building had been heavily bombed and it was a miracle it was still standing, but that it was once the old command center for the Russian military government in a bygone era. I was now lost in the fantasy, intoxicated by the beauty and majesty of what I was now both creating and perceiving.

Often when I have dreams such as these - of paralysing beauty - the sheer generative load of sustaining and maintaining them pulls me into a kind hybrid sub-lucid state, where I no longer believe I am in the dream and don't take its events to be especially seriously, and revert to simply exploring its contents the way one might enjoy and explore the digital world of a video game, or inspect a sculpture or piece of art. I get so caught up in the state of 'flow' of sheer perception I forget that I actually have an existence, an identity, a history or a set of goals - and paradoxically I seem to stay in this state even as my own in-dream brain power increases to dangerous dream-ending levels. This is what happened to me at about this point, for I was flying around the structure at phenomenal speed and inspecting its marvellous and meticulous beauty from all angels, extremely aware and lucid of the technical marvel of what I was inspecting but almost too distracted by it to even notice that I was in an altered state of consciousness, and that somewhere else I had an existence too.

The dream changed a little, and soon the hollow Gothic/Elizabethan structure was even larger than it had been - towering over the city around it like mount Everest itself. The city below it, skyscrapers tightly clustered with spotless shining glass windows - was Tokyo, or so it suddenly appeared, and yet this Russian structure was right next to it, and I wondered how two capital cities managed to literally exist right next to / on top of each-other, and what this meant for regional geopolitics. I was now on top of the hollow structure, looking down over the city of Tokyo. It's skyscrapers hardly came up to more than 5 or 10% of the structures height, and a great fear came over me as I began to fall from the structure and down towards the city below. This was real fear and real pain, and it makes me shudder even as I type this to recall it, it was certainly not pleasant. 

At some point before hitting the ground I remembered that I had control over all of this and slowly hovered back down safely, but then a series of compulsive thoughts / images came to me as I pictured sections of the large Russian structure coming down and collapsing onto the city bellow, with Godzilla like calamatic results. I had difficulty differentiating these flourishes of the imagination from actual dream content, and as is often the case with my use of in-dream imagination, I could not stop producing these simulations as they bore too strongly onto my in-dream emotions to just push back below the surface. Wary of this trap, I decided it was time to wake myself up, which is what I did.

๑๑๑

I find this dream interesting for several reasons, but it mostly speaks for itself. I am a little curious where the fear of heights came from, when everything else about the dream displayed remarkable hedonic qualities and self-serving lucidity. Perhaps I just pushed my own experience within the dream to the limit of what my executive control could emotionally handle, before bottom-up processes broke free and did the only thing they knew how - synthesise fear from the data being reported.

Is this why we do not have these kinds of dreams every night, or indeed in many cases, simply not at all? This dream does strike me as something of a high-stakes game played by my mind unto itself, with risk and reward amplified in equal measure. So in that sense, this probably answers itself: my brain likes to take risks even in its dreams, but it does not really see it that way... and perhaps it is all just a calculated investment. Looking back, this dream was very much worth the fear statistically experienced as the price of admission.