I must be dreaming

I’m a lucky dreamer. I can do everything in dreams. I can read in dreams, I can taste in dreams, I can fly in dream, I can stay in dreams when I’m lucid, I dream in colour, and I seem to be able to remember at least one dream every night. Most people I talk to say they don’t dream and of course they do, they just don’t remember them. My life would be that much less interesting if I didn’t remember my dreams. As for the lucid dreaming and the waking memories of dreams, I believe all this takes is a little practice. For example, if you try flicking the lights on and off in a dream and they don’t work then you are dreaming. If you look at a clock and then look back and it doesn’t say the same time, then you are dreaming. But you have to start remembering to do this in waking life as well, so that it will become habitual and you will remember to do it in a dream. Once you are lucid, many people express difficulty staying in the dream. I’m sure this just takes a little practice too… I’ve read about some twirling technique. But I never really looked into it, because I never had a problem with this. Lucid dreaming is a fascinating experience, and apparently you can make a lot of the experience and learn a lot from the people in it if you are asking the right questions. All I ever do in a lucid dream is fly. I don’t know why… it’s just the first thing I do and then I get all wrapped up in flying. It’s exhilarating. But these are all things everyone can do, it just takes a little practice.

What I really wanted to talk about was the other things that I’ve heard other people can’t do. Let me first discuss dreaming in colour. Now, I don’t think I have ever found anyone who does not dream in colour, so if anyone reading this has experience black and white dreams please let me know because I’m beginning to think this is a myth. Moreover, how do these people not know they are dreaming all the time?? Seems like an easy way to lucidity. But then again, some pretty bizarre and unrealistic things have happened in my dreams and with my ‘reality checker’ down, I couldn’t figure out it was not real. It’s probably the same thing with black & white dreams. I’d like to have one of these non-colour dreams… like you are part of some old-timey movie. Not just filming it, but actually trapped in it. Cool… and bizarre.

Then again, I’ve always wondered if more people dream in black & white and just remember it in colour later, because our minds fill in the blanks. If this is the case, I still know that I dream in colour (at least some of the time) because I remember dreams where colour played a distinct role. You should have seen that huuuge shimmery technicolour horsefish lost in the rainforest jungle. Now that was a killer dream.

Reading in dreams is another experience that most people do not have in dreams and this one I have verified. Most people agree that they have never read in dreams. Some say they have tried and it’s blurry, but others say they don’t think they have ever tried so can’t be sure. (as a side note, reading appears to be like looking at the time, in that if you go back to read again, the words have changed and this is a sure fire way to achieve lucidity if you can get past your own confusion over the discrepancy which can become a frustrating focus of the dream if you can’t get past it. Since we don’t remember details when reading over long distances in waking life anyway, this test doesn’t work when reading long passages, but for signs and IM messages and such, this should work). Overall it seems as though I am part of a small minority of people that can read in dreams. I always wonder what this means about me.

One time I read a nautical book. It was a long book and basically I spent quite a long period of time simply reading the book, which is interesting because I know nothing about sailing and the book was full of terms and pictures which I must have been making up. I should have written down some of the information I learned when I woke up to see if I was making up the right terms, which would mean that I was accessing some sort of storage of facts that must not have come from me, or at least not my present life. Which has important implications for the study of past lives and universal consciousness.

Last night in my dream, I read a letter that was sent to me by a friend. In it, he told me he didn’t drink coffee because it would interfere with activities such as rock climbing, hiking, yoga, etc. The letter was three pages and typed, but I couldn’t remember having gotten it in the mail, so it took me a while to figure out I was reading a letter. Probably something like having amnesia.

I wrote a dream song on the piano last night, as well. The mapping between the pitch and the key on the piano became mapped out perfectly in my head, and I hope I can hold on to that intuition when I get my waking life keyboard soon – YAY YAY YAY!

To conclude today’s blog, I will provide you with a list of some of my favourite dreams:

1. I was putting on a concert, playing a song that I must have been making up in my dream. This part is cool enough, but to top it off I was playing to a crowd made up solely of the Beatles (dozens of Pauls, dozens of Ringos, dozens of Georges, dozens of Johns). The Beatleseses were totally grooving to my music!!!


2. I got lost on some beautiful island but unlike waking life, I wasn’t nervous about it at all. I adventured all over. I got some amazing aerial shots of the whole island because I was in the air for a some portions of the dream. I wasn’t flying in my regular way, but rather was being carried by some invisible force and I would decide where on the island to be dropped. Talking about the dream later in waking life came up with some interesting thoughts on reincarnation. I got some weird singing sandals later in the dream and then my waking life/dream boy and I went to the grocery store.


3. I was at a Pearl Jam concert and they were playing some amazing songs I had never heard before. My best friend was with me and he ended up on stage with Pearl Jam, his waking life favourite band, and he sang a song with them. At this point, he jumps into the crowd for some body surfing. He was crushed in the crowd and died – I did not love this last part. It actually made me so nervous that I called my friend the whole next day to make sure he was alive. I couldn’t get in touch with him all day which made me incredibly anxious. This is one of my favourite dreams because when I told him about the dream, he thought it was so amazing and was happy to have lived it in my dream. The most incredible part of this story is that he actually did live to meet Pearl Jam in waking life, and incredibly but unfortunately he also died in waking life. I will keep the memory of this dream alive for him.


4. I once had an adventure/thriller dream, running around some strange town with Matt Good. There was a guy with nails in his head, and a mob chasing us for stealing something, which I think we might have actually done, but I recall there being a valid explanation for thieving but there was no time to explain that to the angry mod. Amidst all the panic and fleeing, I made out with Matt Good – as a side note, has anyone seen his wife? I recently stumbled upon her entertaining blog (www.jennifergood.net), and daaaamn she’s a fine looking woman. I even have a bit of a girl crush on her. For some reason I never expected Matt Good to marry such a well put together girl… but then again, he is a rock star with all the typical rock star appeal. On the Beautiful Midnight album there is a song called ‘Jenni’s song’ and I wonder if that is just a coincidence or if he has known her for a long time and if she did in fact ‘kill her dad with her car’. If I wasn’t listening only to Christmas music now, I would put on that album right now and listen to ‘the Future is X-rated’ over and over again for old times.


5. I used to have this recurring dream where my uncle would place me on this broken down wall overlooking a foggy, dank water setting. He would then leave me there, and from there on the dream would be different. But every time I would be kidnapped by a stranger – these dreams stopped when my uncle died in waking life and I believe they were predicting the abandonment. Anyway, in this particular version of the dream, I was captured by red stick people. I suppose it was terrifying at the time, but it’s one of my most interesting dreams. I was pretty calm in the dream though, and the stick people told me to sleep but I couldn’t sleep without my pink stuffed elephant (I was quite young at the time). I convinced them to let me go get it and I would come right back. Of course, I took off to my mother’s side as soon as they let me out, and hid there. I really pulled the wool over their eyes! Red stick people… damn, that’s so weird. I never even noticed I was dreaming!

I could go on about dreams forever… so I won’t.

Damn, I just lost ‘The Game’ again.