A Lucid Dream

This is a piece in a growing series of mine about dreams and lucid dreaming. In these stories I give first person accountings of some of the dreams that I have each night. Identities and locations can shift around with little to no warning and the narratives don’t follow typical plot structures. For more of these stories, click here.

Here I am again, walking through my old high school. Everything seems just the way that I remember it. I’m dreaming. I recognize that, though, this time; it’s a lucid dream. A sense of equanimity seems to pervade everything as I examine each feature of the hallway carefully. I wonder if the closer I get to each, the more my dreaming mind might reveal itself. The devil is in the details.

I’m captivated by all that I see — I marvel at the intricacies everywhere. My mind seems to automatically fill in the details of objects no matter which direction I look. Posters I haven’t thought of in years are right there before me in uncanny detail — ones that no waking part of me could possibly remember. How am I doing this? I’m baffled that my mind can create something so intricate while my body lays idle. I’m in awe of a world of my own creation. Moreover, I’m observing my creation as it’s created. I can walk through it and be surprised by its features as though I haven’t designed them myself — some part of me, anyway. I wonder how far I can push this.

I wonder, if I were to start walking into classrooms, would my mind start populating them with people from my memory? Can I interact with them or will it cause the walls of my dreams to come crumbling in around me? It’s happened before. Sometimes when I realize I’m dreaming, I simply attempt to leap into the air and fly. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it’s as though my brain can’t create new imagery at the speed of my attempted flight, and strange, moving blotches start to appear in my peripherals until they take over my field of view entirely and send me crashing to earth. Sometimes I begin to fly but I fall through the ground and find myself within the confines of a different dream — as though I’ve simply switched TV stations, or less simply, as though I’ve slipped through some permeable membrane of imagination and into another one.

But as I walk down this familiar hallway, I wonder what my mind will do if I enter a classroom. Who will I see? I open the first door to find a class full of familiar faces. They’re all younger — seven years younger. I see Daryl. He was never someone I was very close to. But I’d wondered about him only just the other day; I looked him up online and noticed he hadn’t kept up any social media pages in the years since high school. “Does anyone know what ever happened to Daryl?” I asked a few friends in my waking life. None of them knew the answer either.

But here he is standing in front of me, alongside a class full of students I remember well. I approach him. His face is so detailed that I can see the pores on his skin in uncomfortable clarity. Even in waking, I don’t think I’ve ever looked at him so closely before.

“Seven years in the future, no one really knows what happens to you,” I say to him. He’s surprised, but not fully taken aback by the statement. The idea of deleting all his social media pages had already been festering in his mind. He loosely addresses the statement — but the future is still a mystery to him. A couple of other students nearby overhear the conversation and are intrigued enough to approach us. This gives way to an intimate discussion with long-lost faces about the ways our lives may change in the years to come, after high school.

To wake up from a dream like that and be asked to go about the menial tasks of my day was a jarring change of pace, to say the least. Are dreams really something we’re just expected to forget about? Maybe this fundamental part of being alive is worth remembering. Dreams are one of the great unknowns. They’re one of the most profound mysteries of the universe within our minds. Within those first seconds awake entire worlds dissipate. Inversely, though, when I feel like I have only the wispiest thread of a dream lingering before me in those early morning hours, the mere attempt to describe it will open the floodgates.

If I hadn’t tried to record that dream, it would have simply dissipated like so many others — into a vast sea of ephemeral visions. I’m thankful that that’s a memory I have to look back on. It’s a memory that raises more questions than it answers, but I’m humbled by the mystery. It’s sad to think of how many of the most profound dreams to enter our sleeping minds have simply fallen by the wayside — what a colossal waste of creation! We squander our very souls with our morning routines. While we shower, shave and prepare our morning toast the parts of our minds that spend the nights creating learn to repress themselves.

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