(Yet another) Lucid Dream in the Lab

17/3/2021
IMAGE: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Today, I had another Lucid Dream in the lab. The odds of doing so are astounding. I am now starting to wonder whether my autosuggestion technique is a lot more powerful than I first thought, but that remains to be tested.

I come into the lab once again at 8am, sleep deprived. Olivia is sick, so it is just Cagatay setting up. I am tired as hell, but this is not a one-person job, so I do not get to sleep until 10am. By now, I have lost most of my fatigue, but somehow I still manage to get to sleep.

I enter REM and I am standing in a strange palace or temple, looking at an ornate wooden cabinet, with Cagatay at my side. We are the only two characters in the whole dream who are sentient, but automaton-like figures dart about the corridors of the temple, sticking to themselves and irrelevant to the dream plot.

I start magically transforming the cabinet with my mind, extending and reshaping it like a carpenter would, over many days and weeks, but in seconds. I am having a lot of fun doing this, and I am talking to Cagatay while I am doing so, explaining to him my creative process.

The idea hits me. I have a task to do. I do not really understand that I am dreaming per se, and this was not an 'aha' like lucidity moment as such. At some level, I am aware the entire time that I am in a simulation with a job to do. The only difference is that there was no beguiling or engaging dream plot from which to be pulled away from, and as such, the phenomenon of insight attainment (and the sweet sweet emotions that come with that) were not on the menu in this dream. In a strange sense, it was like I was born into a dream that was already lucid to begin with, and the rest was just business.

I perform my saccades, much slower this time (remembering that I rushed them during the last pilot) and I wonder whether these are not indeed "too slow". I perform an LRLR, conduct my task, punctuate this with an LR, perform the second task, and punctuate this again with an LR, some number of times (I believe 8-12). Finally, I finish off with an LRLR to indicate that I am done.

Back to the dream, re-shaping the wooden cabinet. I get bored of doing this, and send up some more random LRLR sequences, just for fun. More than fun; for the irony of 'so casually' leaving an empirical signature for a phenomenon that was considered a scientific 'myth' only a few decades ago. That entertains me greatly. I do this again. And again. Back to the cabinet, I get lost in the dream, and at some point wonder whether I am even dreaming at all, or have been awake the whole time. By now, what little insight-lucidity that had underpinned this dream has well and truly vanished.

I wake up, and remember being lucid. I wonder whether it even happened, and whether I am indeed awake or in a dream right now. A minute passes, and I conclude that I am indeed awake, and that I probably was in a lucid dream previously. I think of it some more, and I become certain.

"Cagatay, I think I did it again..." I call out. 

The Intercom crackles to life.

"My man....." he says.

But I am till sleep deprived; and minus the euphoria of the insight of the last dream, emotionally, I feel like shit. It was like waking up and knowing that you have a funeral to attend. The feeling takes a few hours to fade.

This was not a fun dream at all, looking back.

Perhaps I simply pushed myself too hard.

A Lucid Dream in the Lab

17/3/2021

 IMAGE: John Speaker

The following is an account of a lucid dream that I had in the lab. I have not had a lucid dream in over a year. Despite researching them as my job, it seems that in my thirties, these dreams have become scare experiences in my life. I had long speculated that they had no disappeared, but rather gone into a kind of 'dormancy'. Experiences like this reinforce this theory.

I come into the lab at 8am, severely sleep deprived. Skyrim ambient is playing in the background on a cracked android, and it makes me extremely sleepy. Before long my EEG is gelled up, and I am put into bed, where I worry I will not be able to sleep. Somehow, I do.

I spent some time going into and out of dissociated states; perhaps in retrospect it was N1 since there was some hypnogogic content, but at the time it felt like being awake.

At some point, I am dreaming, and then I am “waking up” and lying in bed, trying to get back to sleep again. This happened over and over again. I can now say with confidence that these were false awakenings, but at the time, they felt very real. I cannot remember much of these dreams. Most of the “dream” that I was in was spent dreaming that I was lying in bed, waking up and falling back asleep again. I suspect this was still N1.

I remember cycling out of a dream, and being full of self-admonishment and inner criticism: “I missed another chance at lucidity!” I said to myself, as I dreamed of lying in the bed in the faraday cage, “I was dreaming, and I did not realise". I would try to get “back to sleep” and the cycle would continue like this through several cycles.

I am on a bus. I am with the sister of a good friend from my highschool years, we are both teenagers again. I had always fancied this girl. Very low level protolucid insight tells me I can turn this into a sex dream, and I do. At this point, my level of awareness was somewhere in between a sense that “this is a dream, and I can control the situation to my favor” and “this is reality, and I can control this situation to my favor”. In a way, I knew that I had control, and that control felt magical, special and wonderful; but I had not yet made the distinction of where that control was coming from. I was not critiquing my own metaphysics at this point, just being practical and goal oriented.

I cycle out of the sex dream, and the inner critic comes alive. “You were supposed to get lucid! This was your closest chance yet! You missed your change again!”. I lay there in my dream bed, in the dream EEG lab, wondering what to do. I figure that I could probably re-enter the sex dream through autosuggestion, and at least that might be nice. Just before I do this, I wonder if I can’t also use autosuggestion to retain the intention to question my reality as well.

I picture the girl, and as her image forms, and I feel myself going back into the dream. I tell myself “you are going remember that this is a dream. You are going to remember to ask yourself this specific question”. Somehow, that thought becomes extremely clear, and extremely vivid. The girl fades form view, and I find myself staring in blackness, as if I had woke up face down in a puddle. I am incredibly sharp of mind, but I have no idea where I am or how I got there.

I talk to myself for a while. I am wondering if I am dreaming or awake, I am wondering if it worked, I wonder where I am. In the black puddle, I can see feint shimmering lights, as if they have reflected off some distant place, but I am too afraid to look up. I know that when I do, I will either be in a lucid dream, or lying "awake" in the bed. After a while, I decide to try it.

I find myself in a wonderful fantasy world, with colored lights moving over the walls, like a Tokyo street at night, or some cyberpunk universe. It looked a little burned orange and grey, but otherwise resembled the TRON universe, or depictions of “the matrix” from William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

 

IMAGE: Depiction of Lucid Dream world

 

I realise that I am in a lucid dream, and I am extremely excited. Immediately I start saccading, but with very poor technique. I do LRLRLRLRLRLRLRLR, and then do perform my specific task. As I do this, I see myself naked in a mirror on the wall. I am extremely muscular, but also twisted and grotesque, like somebody with severe scoliosis. Somehow, I do not panic, or get frightened by my own twisted image, and use the visual representation of myself in the mirror to make sure that I am performing my task appropriately. Now that I think about it, I am not sure I can entirely separate the appearance of the image of myself from the task that I had to perform. I think appearance of this image and control over my actions were reciprocally linked. I finish by performing another LRLRLRLRLRLRLRLR to end the task sequence, then start running around with excitement.

I run through corridors resembling Trigon, at immense speed. I find Cagatay, Mahdad (not present for actual study) Olivia and Eni sitting around laptops, in an open-plan version of EEG Lab #2, without any walls. They are staring at computer screens containing PSG signals, and sitting next to them, I see myself. I am sitting in a chair, looking catatonic or somehow paralyzed. There is a strange expression on my face, kind of sad or depressed looking, or maybe just that dissociated look you see when somebody has passed out on too many drugs. In the middle of my head is a wonderful third eye, full of color, part insidious, part divine, which fills me with dread wonder and horror and hope (depicted in title).

I poked Mahdad, to see what would happen. His body moved backwards, like a ragdoll, and he corrected his posture. I laughed a lot. I knew he could not see me, and I was like a ghost in his world. He was starting intently into the laptop screen, focusing on my biological signals, but here I was in the outside world, present and invisible to him. I look at myself again on the chair, and the third eye evokes a very powerful emotion. I cannot name it.

I wake up in a state of shock. I am back in my bed, and now I realize that I am awake for the first time during the entire ordeal. This feels real, in a way none of the previous awakening had been. I should out in the darkness: “I did it! Guys! I did it!”. Cagatay's voice rings out over the intercom.