Dreams are fantastical, mysterious, and downright magical. Us humans of modern-day society tend to take them for granted, but that has never been the case through our history, nor should we today. In our disenchanted and hyperrational world, dreams for many are the only mystical and creative experiences untethered from regular life… Why do we dream? What do they mean? What do they offer? These are the anchoring questions pondered by thinkers for thousands of years, serving as a connecting thread through our myths, stories, philosophies, and metaphysics…
-”History of Lucidity: The Transmutation of Dreams,” Joey Jung, 2022
Nightmares
I can only remember the nightmares from when I was a kid. In fact, they are some of the most vivid memories I have brought along with me to today. They include:
A giant hand (or glove) chases me in front of my house. It tickles me to death. It reappears in another dream, this time in my Pre-K playground. I think this is my only recurring dream.
I am in a very small room, which only has a very large bed that is facing a door. I feel a presence walking in the hallway beyond the closed door, and hide myself under the sheets. I hear footsteps closer and closer, they/it opens the door, and comes right next to my head, and I can hear a heavy breath… and I wake up.
I was banished to hell. There wasn’t any torture or anything, but I distinctly remember being faced with a dizzying sense of infinity. There is absolutely nothing more terrifying than becoming convinced that you will, from this moment on, be in the same state forever. After waking up from this one, I had to walk around my house for a good few minutes before I could shake that existential dread.
Fortunately for me, a lot of times I was gifted with the realization that I was dreaming during nightmares. My method as a kid to wake up was to open and close my eyes really hard, and then sometimes my real eyes would open. Genius!
No Longer Nightmares
At some point, I think during middle or high school, dreams stopped being scary and became fascinating. There is no movie, drug, hallucination, etc. that can ever approach the “real”-ness of a dream, and of course it is oftentimes completely ridiculous, straight out of the depths of your imagination. Eventually, I discovered the weird and wonderful world of lucid dreaming, or the ability to “wake up” in a dream and be able to move, interact, and even shape the dream world with full autonomy and consciousness.
I never got very good at it, but I had some very colorful and weird experiences over the past few years. One of the first things you do when trying to lucid dream is starting a dream journal, and there are some real gems in there:
8/12/21: Phineas and Ferb had a Kobe Bryant tribute. But during it there’s an alien invasion. But I’m watching it on a video screen. But they also realize they’re on a show and squint at the camera. (I remember this one. The squint was very unsettling)
8/7/22: Very long and connected dream about how a person is trying to combine multiple people dreams into a super dream robot machine. Involved me missing school 10 days needing excuse for a project with Alex and Kodak documentary. (don’t remember)
1/18/23: Crazy, beautiful, lucid dream. In a big open atrium mall. Looking for mr bixler and walk in site to find him. Lucid and walk around being ksichecivous. Try to fit in fell cabinet got smaller and squeeze d though. Tried to medjtageg u dream but got unsuccessful (no clue about this one)
6/15/23: Woke up thinking “New York is gonna be very different.” Right before I was in Central Park and scooters were being automated. Right before I bought food truck food with Simon (supposed to be breakfast) but it turned into Chinese food and Simon started speaking Chinese. We both ate cut up beanstalk (from Jack and the Beanstalk) and I got a slice of margherita (2.99). (Very vividly remember)
The trippiest part of this is that your brain very much does not like you trying to “wake up” in your dream. So it does this clever trick where you literally wake up in your bedroom, and everything is normal, so you think you actually woke up but it’s still a dream and you end up forgetting everything. And only later do you realize it was a dream because, now that you think about it, there was a weird lamp by your bed that definitely does not exist. Interestingly, you can also reliably evoke this “false awakening” by spinning in your lucid dream. So next time you realize you are dreaming while dreaming, spin around and try to remember that when you wake up in your bed, nothing is real!
Lucid Dreams
My interest in this topic culminated last year around this time, when I took a very interesting course in the history department called Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud: Masters of Suspicion. It was the most difficult class I ever took, simply because I could barely understand anything that I read or heard in lecture. But it was a great crash course into philosophy, and I convinced my professor that Freud → Dreams → Lucid Dreams, and I wrote my term paper on it.
It is really long, but the gist is that lucid dreaming has been more prevalent through history than we think. Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, and Nietzsche were all fascinated with dreams, and even showed an understanding of lucid dreaming as a concept and experience. I am convinced I found solid evidence that, contrary to popular belief, Freud did know about lucid dreaming, but I am not sure who to tell about this great discovery. How lucidity affected (or undermined) his theories of unconscious and dream psychoanalysis is a topic that should be studied further. (But again, I don’t know who would do this, or why.)
The most unbelievable thing I uncovered during my research is a line of Tibetan Buddhism that claims to be able to consistently lucid dream, but also retain consciousness during deep sleep. As far as I can tell, this should not be possible, but there are stories of monks being able to hear and recall conversations of researchers when they were in deep sleep (measured in a lab).
The End?
There are many things I left out, and this was a little too haphazard of an essay for my liking, so I may revisit this topic in the future. In the meantime, see below for two book recommendations on the topic, and also take a glimpse at my term paper if you so please.
Do you want to lucid dream? Read Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge. Straightforward and effective.
Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. I only got a few pages in the book, but he goes into their absolutely mindblowing practices.
And finally, my paper. It narrowly beats my Huey Long paper as my most favorite academic output in college. Expect an essay on the Kingfish soon.
