When normal life is disappointing, dreams are a refuge. Unsatisfied with the servile repetition of your daily routine? A dream can take you on an adventure, pose choices that mean something, show you something new. If you’re in a creative rut, a dream can spark an idea, play music in your ear or enact the plot of your next novel. If you’re scared, in a dream you may face your fear. Maybe you find out that the thing you were afraid of is not quite so bad, or, conversely, you find it every bit as terrible as you could have imagined. Either way, you will awaken with courage. And no matter the setting, the company, no matter the challenge facing you or the steps that you must take to surmount it, when you are dreaming, everything feels right. The ennui of waking life is nonexistent in this realm. Whether your dream puts you in the path of a dangerous killer or in the front of your high school classroom dressed only in your underpants, you rise to the task unquestioningly. Your mind is completely in the moment; it does not complain about its fate, even if it is tragic or terrifying. Even in the most mundane dream about work or school or grocery shopping or taking out the trash, the one emotion that you will never feel is boredom. Your mind does not ache to be somewhere else. Presumably, if it wanted to, it would just go.
I have always been fascinated by lucid dreaming: awareness of the fact that you are in a dream, and, with practice, the ability to control your dreams. When I was really young, I was able to achieve this lucid state without even trying, as I’m sure many children are. Every once in a while I’d just be aware that I was in a dream, and carry on, without even questioning it. I lost this power as I got older, though, around the time that my childhood creativity started to wane. Then, as a teenager, I heard that there was a name for this intentional dreaming, and I itched to experience it again. I was fascinated. I looked up all of the strategies to “become lucid.” Nearly every night, I’d lay in bed on my back with my arms at my sides, staying perfectly still. I had read that once the pins and needles passed, my body would fall asleep but my mind would still be awake, and I’d be carried over effortlessly into a lucid dream state. The urge to move never passed, though, and all of these attempts ended with me rolling over onto my stomach and falling asleep comfortably, often exhausted by how long I had forced myself still, my back rigid and my mind racing. I attempted to keep a “dream journal”—I took a fresh new notebook and kept it next to my bed, with the intent of writing down whatever I could remember of my dreams the second that I woke up.1 This was supposed to improve my “dream recall” and familiarize me with what my dreams felt like, presumably so I’d be able to recognize when I was in one. However, despite my efforts, I have never had a single intentional lucid dreaming experience. I have a lucid dream on occasion, though. In fact, I can remember my first one.
I was in a dimly lit stairwell. The atmosphere around me was real yet unreal in the way that dreams are. The details were nonexistent, my field of vision narrow, but it seemed perfectly natural that I should be where I was, and all of the sensory experiences—sound, smell, touch, the fearful beating of my heart inside my chest—were as vivid as real life, if not more so. The stairway was narrow, claustrophobic. Lit by a single lone light bulb hanging from the ceiling of each landing, the stairs and the walls all blended together to form a dark, lifeless brown that bordered on grey in its hue. I was being chased by police. The nature of my crime did not matter to me, but, I can imagine that I was probably guilty, because my consciousness was telling me to run. This was a familiar terror—my sleeping mind’s clichéd nightmare of choice. Some people have dreams of their teeth falling out, of an intruder knocking at their door, or of being late to work. I have dreams of running for my life.
So I ran up the stairs, heavy with the knowledge that a group of cops were not far behind me. At each landing, my path was barricaded by a door. Sometimes, the door was open. Other times, it was locked. If locked, I’d run back down the stairs, snake through a different corridor, and then tread upward again, either through an unlocked door or back downstairs and around another corner of this labyrinthine, form-shifting mess of a staircase. I felt no shortness of breath, did not anticipate stopping. I didn’t hear any thoughts buzzing in my head the way that I do in real life. In dreams, thought and action are inseparable. I had no identity apart from a vague construction of “myself”: a fugitive on the run. Unburdened by the threat of physical fatigue but still saddled with the grave feeling that escape was impossible, I ascended and descended stairways with ease, with a vague sense of fear in the back of my mind and the insatiable drive to keep going.
I encountered a few locked doors in a row and started to grow concerned. It was at this point that I “heard” my first thought. My mind would say this door is going to be locked, too—I know it! and then the door would be, and I’d run back down the stairs in search of the next one. Run up, stop, shake a locked door handle, run down, repeat. I could feel my foes trailing me, knew that it was going to be over at any moment. And I had the vague sense that when this happened, it wouldn’t be arrest or jail that threatened me, but death.
A funny thing happened next. Ascending yet another identical-looking staircase, I suddenly grew hopeful. I thought, this one will be open for sure, and then, when I got there, it was. This triggered an epiphany. I realized that I was in control. When I anticipated a locked door, a locked door stood before me. When I anticipated an unlocked door, I was able to pass right through. I could hear the thoughts in my head, as though I were awake, and I realized that those thoughts were in control! So I started experimenting. I forced that little voice to remain optimistic. The doors in front of me would be open, always. And they were. I breezed through door after door, elated, with the complete knowledge that I was in a dream.
This awareness did not relieve me from the compulsion to keep running, however, and as my success streak lengthened, I started to panic. My conscious mind had taken the reins, and it brought with it the noxious habit of assuming that bad fortune was always around the corner. My mind started to doubt its own power, to talk over itself. It was repeating the door will be open, the door will be open, but simultaneously, a similar-sounding voice would utter of course it will be locked, who are you trying to fool? I met closed door after closed door, sure that I had lost control and that I would be captured. Then, the little voice in my head assured me that, although it was basically certain that I would not be able to escape my fate, I was in a dream. I would wake up before feeling any pain.
This only frustrated me. I did not want to waste my lucid dreaming experience on being caught and waking up. I knew that some people could change the environment of their dreams. Maybe that would work. I stopped running, tried to imagine a pleasant meadow or a scenic mountaintop or the comfort of my own bedroom or something besides the wretched staircase, but nothing happened. The thoughts came from a shallow source: my ego, the same voice that impotently murmured that the doors would be unlocked when my true “self” had already barricaded them shut. It was no use. I could try to conjure images of hills or lakes or beaches or cozy armchairs, but my mind was firmly present on that staircase, and there it would stay. In the last image I remember of the dream, I was on the ground. The corridor had widened now, and its ceilings had lifted. I was surrounded by about five men in uniform, all hunched over me. They were murmuring to one another. Before learning what they wanted with me, I woke up.
Why do we dream? Are dreams a line of communication between our conscious minds and our subconscious? Are they a form of wish fulfillment, like Freud thought? Are dreams supposed to communicate lessons—the Jungian viewpoint—or force to the surface repressed feelings that our waking minds keep pushing away? If so, do all dreams serve this purpose, or only some of them? What about those “visitation dreams” people swear are messages from their loved ones beyond the grave? Are these dreams the ultimate form of wish fulfillment, assuaging the harsh pains of real life? Or do we go somewhere else when we dream, something akin to astral travel, whereby our consciousness momentarily makes contact with the place that it inhabited before it came here? Perhaps it is a mixture of all of these. Perhaps you can “travel” to other places without leaving your own mind at all—you have everything you need right there within you. Perhaps you do actually go somewhere else where you dream, a place with your best interests in mind, that wants you to grow your soul. Perhaps that external place has actually lived within you the whole time, that it is the place you go when you daydream, write a story, hear a piece of music in your head that you’ve never heard before. Just because it exists internally, would such a place be any less real? Would a dream’s messages be any more or less real, whether they come from some spiritual realm or simply from the dark recesses of one’s own unconscious mind?
If dreams come from one’s own subconscious, then this means that it is possible for a person to know something without knowing that they know it. Take, for example, my staircase dream. The dream stuck with me, and its meaning seemed obvious: I was in control of my own destiny. If I wanted something to happen, all I had to do was will it into existence. And somehow, I knew this already. Perhaps I had heard it articulated before (it is a fairly popular concept, after all); perhaps it is something that is known to all of us on some level, something we force ourselves to forget because it sounds ridiculous. Either way, the idea that I was in control of my own destiny was now in the forefront of my mind. I had now achieved two distinct levels of understanding. My unconscious mind understood the concept well enough to dream up a scene that illustrated it perfectly, and my conscious mind understood all of the words necessary to explain the concept. I had achieved intellectual understanding—if I was tested on the idea in school, I would have gotten an A. But I did not actually understand. My glass was still half empty, I still lived according to the limits of my defeatism. My life remained unchanged, got worse before it got better. It seemed as though the dream did nothing at all.
Or maybe I had simply acted exactly as the dream had told me I would. I had understood, momentarily, that I alone had defined the confines within which I lived. I may have even believed, momentarily, that I could change. But it was all just words. I knew how to describe what I needed to do, but the actions evaded me. I didn’t have the courage to be optimistic—what if I was disappointed? I didn’t have the confidence—what if success brought about a responsibility that I wasn’t ready for, and everything came crashing down? I didn’t know what I’d even will into existence if I had the power. I needed to learn, to grow, to experience more. I couldn’t just will myself happy, or successful, or even just okay. This begs the question: was the dream right? Was I autonomous? Was the dream merely a scene in a movie that had already been written, propelling my story closer to a predetermined ending? Or was it a signpost, pointing towards the path to redemption?
Why are the most successful people in this world the most persistent, not the most talented? Because they believe. “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you”2—it’s ironic, how the people who purport themselves to have the most faith are often nonbelievers, groveling on their knees helplessly begging an external god for a power that lives inside of them. The religious look externally for guidance. Yet, if the phrase “you are gods”3 is kept in the forefront of one’s mind, the Bible reads like a self-help book.
Why do we lose our potency? It seems necessary for some of us to. Things tend to follow a normal distribution, and there will always be weak people in this world, just as surely as there will always be strength. Does this mean that they do not have a choice?
Several notebooks have been killed this way over the course of my life.
Matthew 7:7
John 10:34