Dreams! Everyone has them, more or less. Did you check that your hand has 5 fingers? This post is about those weird hallucinations that happen when you sleep.
First, get a good sleep
Is it past 10 PM when you're reading this? What the hell are you doing?? Go to bed. Thank you. If you're reading this on a phone in bed, I have bad news for your sleep habits.
Anyway, it is very unlikely you are reading this article just to get lectured on what is a good sleep schedule, so let's move on to dreams.
Dream habits
If you have a paper and pencil, you can note down your dreams. 1-2 sentences should be enough. That's the part when I "rationalize" the dream without thinking and it looks more coherent that it really was, but it's fine.
I almost only take notes when the night's over because have you ever turned on the light and then searched for your precious slumber again? It's gone.
Here are the recurring tropes on my end:
- The dog that can jump an infinite height. Flying won't help. Usually wakes me up. Could be a nightmare but I like dogs so it's just an annoying thing.
- An alternate version of my home town, with an actual train station, but in the middle of an arthurian forest. Next to it, a hidden metropolis where there is a lake in real life.
- Plants that can grow suddenly and fill the entire universe in a fraction of a second when you notice them. Wakes me up too. Weirdly, it doesn't happen with the overgrown forest above.
- Staring at the corner of a room makes you see all its molecules even from very far away, in a weird zoom effect. Then it produces fractal objects full of corners out of thin air. Then even when you see a blank void around you, you see an intricate library of everything, and the fractal spreads until your brain is unwound.
- Familiar houses with 1-2 more floors.
- Awesome music or art. Thanks, brain?
- Limited versions of flying, except when it's the unlimited kind and I accidentally step a few billion lightyears away and then wake up.
I mentioned a reality test in the intro, but it's very rare to think about it while in the dream, so it isn't effective at being lucid. Speaking of…
Lucid dreaming is hard
I have semi-lucid dreams from time to time, in which I exclaim "hey this is a dream, nice!" and fail to change the world around me. They turn into a sketch of themselves very fast.
That's a bit like a game made in a manual memory-allocated language, if there's code with undefined behavior. Move too much or spawn an object, and it crashes with a segmentation fault (aka you wake up). This example sounds like it comes from experience, I know.
Lucidity definitely comes in several levels. Knowing you're in a dream vs remembering that you can change it. Also, waking up in a second dream: happens to the best of us.
Conclusion
This blog is turning into a complete mess of topics. Don't worry, for the next article is merely about [insert topic here, I don't even know it myself at the time of writing. EDIT: it's stop motion animation].
Good night, sleep tight, and see ya in the next one!