Waking Life

A metallic cold seeped through my skin as the muzzle pressed close to my chest, almost touching my ribs. That instant, fear gave me a strength – an infinite strength – that was adequate to displace the gun and make my escape. I ran for my life.

Passages, alleys, boulevards blurred past me as I ran, ran and ran. Perhaps, I would have run more had I not hit a dead end. The edge of a cliff, to be more precise. There was no way I could run back. I just could not do that. I had to decide, fast. Then it hit me – I could jump.

I jumped. I floated down like a feather, the winds carrying me tenderly in its arms. I experienced a holy moment – one that seemed to last for eternity. I was placed gently on the laps of a pool of water. Then, the moment came to an abrupt end as it dawned on me that I knew not how to swim.

But I just knew what to do. I decided to wake up.

*****

“And as one realized that one is a dream figure in someone else’s dream, that is self-realization.”
-Federico García Lorca

Lucid dreams are dreams where you are aware of the fact that you are dreaming. The movie “Waking life” (8.3/10) explains the phenomenon of lucid dreams pretty intelligibly. This guy gets trapped in a dream where he dreams and awakens in the dream itself, going on in an endless loop. It’s a case of false awakening, where one dreams of being awakened.

You can test if you are having a lucid dream by a few simple methods. Read some text, look away, and read it again, or look at your watch, and remember the time, look away and look back. In most dreams, the text or the time would have changed. Also, light switched don’t generally work and reflections on mirrors are blurred or distorted.

Lucid dreaming can be induced too. The knowing and thinking about it itself is a precursor to lucid dreaming. A concerted effort to experience it will certainly result in one, though the ability to control the dream may vary from individual to individual.

More often than not, I’m aware of the fact that I am dreaming while still dreaming. It seems to give me a chance to do stuff which I cannot do normally, in my real life. For instance, I can swim in my dreams, or take some steps in thin air which I am otherwise not capable of doing. And sometimes, when you are in trouble in a dream, or on the verge of having a nightmare, you can ask yourself if u are in a dream and snap out of it. I haven’t really explored the possibilities, but plan to whenever I have such dreams. One problem I have, though, is my inability to recall my dreams.

One aspect of this is having a déjà vu in dreams. A sequence of events which u know has happened before in a previous dream, but never in ur real life. There are even some people u have never met in real life, but keep bumping to in ur dreams. This is freaky.

Dreaming is something I have always loved to indulge in, perhaps concurrent with my desire to sleep. Maybe, it is time to take it a bit seriously. This line from the movie ‘Waking Life’ sums up my feelings fairly accurately.

"They say dreaming is dead, no one does it anymore. It’s not dead. It’s just that it’s being forgotten. I am trying to change all that. By dreaming everyday."