{ Follow Your Dreams }

*** Audio Blog ^ Up there : )

   I had an interesting dream last night, lucid. I know a lot of you know about lucid dreaming, but it's where you look around while you're dreaming and realize that you're dreaming. This shouldn't be very hard to do because things rarely make sense in your dream, hence the retelling of dreams which normally goes, "I was at my house, but it wasn't my house because this place was three stories tall and the walls were purple" .. that's what they call a "dream sign" .. the added two stories and purple walls, nonsense, but your brain actually shuts down the logic center when you're dreaming.

   It's a complicated thing when you realize that you're dreaming in the dream. For me, it normally happens in a stressful dream, like last night, because you're really trying to figure things out, find a solution, and with that tiny bit of stress induced logic, sometimes you'll look around and say, "This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful life. This is a dream."

   But like I said, to awaken is complicated. For one, most times you can't stay asleep once you realize that you're asleep. It's a bit of a shocker, and it will normally pull you out of your dreams. This is unfortunate, because once you find out that you're dreaming, you can do anything ... or many things. Flying is one of my favorites. And if it was a stressful dream, you're instantly liberated from that situation, knowing it's not real.

   Staying asleep it tricky, especially if you take a moment to think that your body is lying someplace, paralyzed below the sheets, while you run wild in the dream world. Many artists and inventors find their works in dreams. The murder mystery novel I wrote came directly from a dream, and I'm constantly waking up with new ideas and realizations to write down. What a strange thing that we take for granted, that DMT trip that all must take every night - cats, dogs, priests, and school teachers, there's no opting out on these out of body travels and hallucinations.   

   Another interesting thing to consider: Once you know you're dreaming, you'll also have to accept the fact that nothing you're seeing around you exists, not the trees or the sky or the people around you. The physical surroundings won't pose much of a problem - once you become a dream artist (which I am not) you can change the sky, make it stormy, sunny, add a rainbow, but the people can be difficult.

   Example - the first lucid dream I ever had took place in the Winnie back when we were living on the city streets in Venice, and Juwels was there with me. She's in most of my dreams. Anyway, in the dream, I was getting into it with some homeless guy who was outside the Winnie's window making a ruckus. I told him to go get drunk and crazy someplace else, not wanting the cops or the neighbors to roll by and see him there outside our rig and think that we were together.

   The guy finally walked away with his cart, and when I popped my head back into the Winnie, I was annoyed that he even knew which motorhome was ours, thinking he might be nagry with me and vandalize it later when we were away. But then I looked down at my feet and saw that there was carpet. "Oh," I said in relief, "but this isn't our Winnie, we have bamboo floors." But when I turned back around to look at the front cab, it looked just like ours. I must have been having a strong night of awareness, because I burst out with, "This doesn't make sense. This is a dream! I'm dreaming !!"

   I was so excited that I ran over to juwels, who was sitting in a rolling computer chair (which was another thing that we don't have in the real Winnie) and I spun her chair around and yelled, "Babe, I'm dreaming! I'm dreaming!!"

   I didn't take a moment to consider that if I was dreaming and nothing was real, that would mean that juwels wasn't real either. But when I swiveled her chair around, still hollering about how I'd figured out that I was in a dream, I was a shocked to find that she had turned into a mannequin. I turned away from the thing to see that my other friend who was there was also sitting lifeless as a mannequin, and there was a baby mannequin lying on the floor. The bum, the carpet, the Winnie and everyone else, except for me, where not real, and I became panicked, saying, "I'm all alone, I'm All Alone!!"

   And then I woke up.

   Anyway, one of the spookiest things about the lucid dreaming deal is the "dream people" because although you create them, they aren't exactly robots to be controlled, they have their own agenda, and if you tell them that you think you're dreaming, they'll almost always tell you that you're not. In fact, they can get angry about it if you push the topic.

   I was sitting in a kitchen once with a few guys when I realize that I was dreaming, and I told them I was dreaming.

   "No you're not," they said.

 

   "Yes, I am. I can tell."

   This went back and forth, until one finally said, "So what if you are ?!!?"

   "So then none of this is real, and I can do anything I want," I said, picking up a stack of plates and dropping them on the ground.

   "What are you doing???" he yelled as they shattered.

   "It's not real," I said, "And you're not real either. I made you up."

   And then I woke up.

   So the key is to stay asleep, and awake in the dream, and stay cool about it. Nobody likes to be told that they don't exist, not even dream people. 

   I've had dreams were I've told juwels that it was all a dream, and rather than turning into a mannequin, she would just look up at me with her big brown eyes, so sad, and that would rip me from the dream. I've approached her before in the dream telling her that she could stay, and that I would play along with it, and that kind of worked. 

   But last night when I realized I was dreaming, in the middle of a beekeeping dream, I didn't tell her or anyone else that I knew I was dreaming, I just looked at the hives, all single stack hives (and we only have doubles, triples and quadruples) and I thought, these aren't my hives, I must be dreaming. It was a stressful dream with a fire and the fire truck and groups of men and all of our hives swarming away, and when I realized that it was all made up, I had the urge to spin around and yell, "This is all a dream !!" but thought better of it. Juwels was there, and there were all the men in uniform, working, and they wouldn't be too happy with me if I yanked the curtain down.

   So I turned back into the field, and saw Juwels standing there looking worried about the hives and the bees, and I thought that I'd give her a big hug, showing her I wanted her there and cared for her even in this made up reality, and then I was going to whisper in her ear that it was all just a dream and that we should go away from the drama and go have fun. But when I hugged her, she wouldn't hug me back. It was the strangest thing, like she knew that I knew. I asked her why she wouldn't hug me back, but she was barely animated. I tried it again later, and the same thing happened. I was happy that I'd awoken in the dream, and that I could stop worrying about the bees, but then I fell back into the dream and laid in the grass and just watched everybody hurrying around in their roles.

   We sleep 1/3 of our lives. That means that I've been asleep in this dream world for over 11 years. And the subconscious plays tricks on us in this other consciousness, not always fun. I'm fascinated with these years we spend paralyzed in bed with our logic sensors turned off, and little by little, I've been trying to wake up to these scenes and fly around the room or bring back the dead.

   There are some really interesting Stanford studies on lucid dreaming, one of which where they play back a recording to the test subject (in their own voice) which says, "Hey - Brian, you're dreaming. Look around. This is all just a dream."

   Maybe I'll try that : ?

That's all for dreaming for now, loVe,

 p&j