Dreams

I took a nap this afternoon for two reasons. Firstly, my internal clock has been completely out of whack for about the last week and my body seems to think that 2 PM is bed time, and secondly because I had a headache that made doing just about anything else painful. (And I still have it; it’s diminished, but won’t go away.)

During this nap I had some weird dreams. It begins with me walking through a huge crowded city with enormous skyscrapers lining the streets. I’m trying to get somewhere, back to a hotel or something. And as I’m walking down a sidewalk, a huge storm of comes barrelling out of nowhere, tearing apart buildings and obliterating everything in its path, and voosh, it kills me.

I wake up, still tired with a headache, so I roll over and go back to sleep.

I return to the city. Same place. Same thing happens. Storm comes out of nowhere, wrecks the city and kills me.

Then I restart the dream in a different place, and the dream becomes semi-lucid, I’m aware that I’m in a dream and that a storm is going to come out of nowhere and kill me, so it becomes sort of like a game. I try running into a building before the storm hits me, but it still kills me. I try getting on a train, but the storm still kills me. I try talking to other people, warning them that a storm is coming, but that doesn’t help.

Then I start moving toward the storm to find out where it’s coming from, and I find that it’s being created at the top of a tall skyscraper where people are partying and a rock band is playing; it’s like they’re summoning it, stirring up the clouds above them with their noises.

Having discovered the source of the storm, I am somehow able to evade its path of destruction, but something else ends up killing me anyway. I fall out of a window or a building topples on me.

And now for the finale of the dream, which makes no sense.

Finally, after having been killed many times in this city, I find myself in a large white room with two others (who took on the bodily forms of two old dead actors, whom I won’t name because it seems ridiculous in waking life). We were looking at a slide presented on a projection screen which displayed a little squiggle at the center of a large circle.

“We did it!” one of the old guys said, smiling and giving me a hug. I had a vision that the city was now completely devoid of all life and motion; it was empty and still. Somehow this was a victory.

Looking at the slide, I understood that the squiggle in the center represented the storm, while the large circle around it represented… our soul’s understanding and experience of it, or something. So we had gained victory over the storm not by destroying the storm, but by growing the circle around it large enough that it diminished in its relative significance. And we had grown the metaphorical circle by continually trying to escape the storm, even though the storm always won.

At this moment I had a few insights, which seemed profound in the dream:

One insight was that the soul “solves” problems (at least certain sorts of problems) by growing around them, not by annihilating them (which it does not have the power to do by itself).

“Aha,” I said, trying to put this realization into words, “The bridge one must cross becomes the cross one must bear.” I thought that was very profound.

The old guy laughed and replied, “Yes, but don’t say that; it won’t make sense to anyone.”

In the dream, I thought, but I must share it, it’s so profound! Upon waking, I realize that “bearing your cross” is already filled with enough varied meaning for people that adding the metaphor of crossing a bridge is only likely to obfuscate it. (Although I thought the double meaning of the word “cross” was interesting.)

Another insight was that life experiences are like movies on a screen. The soul, or the consciousness, or whatever, is like the movie screen, while the movie is the experience of life. The screen is necessary for the movie to exist, it remains existing even after the movie’s over, and the movie can never hurt or damage the screen. The sufferings of life are like the conflicts in the movie; they’re real from the point of view of the movie, but they’re illusory from the point of view of the screen. The screen remains pure and untouched. (How to actually separate what is the movie and what is the screen is perhaps very difficult while the movie is still playing; it’s hard to really see the screen “behind” the movie, they seem like one thing while the movie is playing.)

The final insight is the most difficult to express in words, but I will try. The soul does not solve its problems with logic, but rather with experience and Free Will. Actually everyone probably intuitively understands this when it comes to something like love. Where does love for someone come from? It’s not the result of some kind of logical deduction. But the insight is more than that; it’s that everything the soul grows or becomes is “beyond” logic. This is not to say that logic is “wrong” or unimportant; it is useful, important, and an undeniable part of worldly existence. The soul still “contains” logic. But soul growth comes from the use of Free Will in response to experiences, from decisions of the heart, on which logic itself is founded in first place.

Another example may be: why do you enjoy a piece of music? You don’t follow logical arguments for or against it; it is simply in the nature of the music to emotionally move you. There may be some logical basis for the music, the mathematical structures behind the harmonies of the sound, the physical nature of the neurons firing in your brain as the sounds vibrate through your ear’s cochlea. But the emotional experience of the music is beyond all that, even if it depends on it for its physical manifestation.

Reading back over all that, I’m not sure if any of it is interesting or makes much sense, but I thought it worth writing about for at least my own interest.

I still often think back to that strangely vivid dream I had in 2018, Two weeks in another world, in which I thought the dream lasted for an entire two weeks. Obviously I was not in a coma for two weeks; the dream really only lasted a few hours or perhaps even a few minutes. But what exactly does “really” even mean? In waking life, we perceive a world through our senses and derive meaning out of it, but just how “real” is that meaning? We could say it is not real at all, because it is entirely open to interpretation; different interpretations of the same set of perceptions create different meanings. On the other hand, we could say those meanings are the ultimate reality, because it is with and through those meanings that we experience the world and exercise our Free Will, our very being. So if defining the nature of reality is difficult enough with waking life, what about dreams?

The experience of speaking with others in dreams is what mystifies me the most. In a dream, I am not consciously thinking or deciding what another being says, so just where the heck do his words come from?! I suppose it could be something like GPT-3, just a bunch of connections in the language part of the brain firing randomly? And perhaps when it says something seemingly profound, it’s just a matter of survivorship bias; it outputs mostly nonsense, but when it outputs something that the conscious mind responds well to, it gets remembered and seems more mystifying than it actually is. That might be it.

Dreaming is fun! More dreams please!

I just had one of the weirdest dreams I’ve ever had, so I thought I should write it down.

The idea that dreams are journeys to (or experiences in) other worlds isn’t new. Some years ago, I dreamt that I was in a little house with a little old woman who was sweeping the floor. The place felt so real. I asked her, semi-lucidly, “If I am just dreaming, am I just creating this house in my head?” She replied, “You were invited here.” Later on in that dream, I came across some weird-looking people walking on a sidewalk. I asked them, “If I am just dreaming when I talk to you, am I really talking to myself?” One of them replied, “Would you learn anything?”

So I think the nature of these dreamworlds, and the nature of consciousness and reality, are at the very least not as intuitive as they may seem while awake. (Like emotion, an experience is always real. You can’t have a fake emotion. You can’t have a fake experience. There may be some question as to whether the experience is self-consistent and/or conforms to a greater reality outside or beyond of itself (though I am not sure how exactly we define that), which we may use to identify hallucinations and delusions, but the experiences themselves are real.)

Anyway, the weirdest aspect of this dream was the sheer amount of time I felt like I spent in it. Time perception often goes a bit wacky in dreams, but I felt like I spent an entire two weeks in another world. The second weirdest aspect was that it was far more self-consistent than a regular dream. Or at least it felt that way; I’ve forgotten much of it, so there are a bunch of gaps in terms of how I got from point A to point B in retrospect, but I felt firmly that I was in this other world the whole time, self-consciously knowing that I was in this other world.

I don’t remember exactly how it began. I was in a different but very human-like body. It was an older child’s or young-adult’s body; it was definitely not an adult body, my guess is because I was new to that world so it made more sense to be in a body that suggested it needed to be looked after. Everyone had long hair. No one had facial hair. So everyone looked a bit like the elves in Lord of the Rings. Everyone wore pretty plain clothes; I guess they were more robe-like rather than shirt and pants. But they weren’t ornate or decorated or fancy (like what the elves in LOTR wear), they were very mundane and boring, but there were a variety of colors and they all went together. People didn’t seem to have much of a sense of individuality as no one seemed to be trying to stand out or look any better than anyone else. Some adults wore some funny things in their hair, they were like colorful little hoops that came out at angles. They would look clownish and ridiculous in this world, but they seemed to work there. Only adults wore these, not children.

They had no movies or televisions or telephones, but they also had no books. They didn’t seem to have any desire or need to tell stories like we do. We’re always inundating ourselves with stories with novels and movies and TV shows and even the news presents information in the form of stories. They seemed to have no sense of story at all. No fairy tales for kids, no legends. That was pretty weird. They did have technology though; the closest thing they had to a TV was a sort of hologram box, which was like a talking 3D monochrome bust of a person behind glass. Only adults seemed to use it, so I guess that was either a sort of news broadcasting thing or perhaps a two-way communication device.

They didn’t seem to have any over-arching governments that I could sense; at the very least it didn’t seem to concern the everyday lives of anybody. They had people who lived by themselves away from everyone else, then small collections of people in villages, and then the largest communities were cities. But there were no real “streets” because there were no cars or even horses, and even the cities were compact and uncrowded enough that you could walk to anywhere you wanted. And the cities were largely unpaved, so you still had a bunch of trees and grass outside. The cities did have some very tall buildings, but nothing like a skyscraper or even an office building. It was all colorful and all seemed to be made of wood or stone; no steel or concrete. And, like their clothes, everything was very colorful. They definitely seemed to be hypersensitive to color, like everything had to be colorfully pleasing to the eye. There weren’t any signs, much less any advertising. In this world, we put pictures and brand logos and writing all over everything, and everything gets to looking very cluttered. None of that here. I wonder if they used colors to code things and I just didn’t notice, since they didn’t even have signs with writing to let you know what buildings were what.

Before you entered any village or city, they had prayer stations at which you were expected to pray. I am not sure what their religion was and other than these prayer stations I didn’t get much sense of a religion. But you were expected to pray for the place you were about to enter and respect it and offer something of yourself to the community, even if it was just your kindness. Like they didn’t want you to enter anywhere with a negative spirit.

They had huge trains which ran from city to city. These huge trains were like hotels, you had your own room in them, and they ran between four tracks, one on each corner of the connected box-like “rooms”. I was sharing a room with some other “travelers” from earth. I only took the train once, but the journey took like a day and a half. And someone stole some of toys I had been given earlier (which were like LEGOs, little building blocks, and they did seem to have an obsession with building; not just building in general, but building things to look beautiful and to go with the shapes of the land, to compliment the land, not to conquer it). I told a “security guard” or “peace keeper” on the train that my blocks had been stolen, but they just told me that I had to take care of my own belongings, so they didn’t seem to care much. But I spent much of the rest of the trip trying to figure out who had stolen them (we had had visitors to our room that the other travelers were talking to).

Aside from stealing, I saw no crimes. I didn’t even hear an unkind word said to anyone or about anyone.

Oh, and the buildings didn’t have electric lights in them (they didn’t seem to have electricity, at least not as we use it with wires and such), nor did they have lanterns or candles (I don’t recall seeing any fire at all, or lightning in a storm for that matter). During the day, sunlight would pour in through high windows and reflect around the ceiling and some give light to everything. That said, I don’t remember there being any lights at night either, but I could clearly see. I wonder if they were simply equipped with much better eyes that could see well in low light.

Aside from colors (although they made no pictures or paintings) and architecture, they were also obsessed with music. Although they didn’t really have speakers, rather it would reverberate through the walls or something; I never really understood where it came from, and I never saw any instruments (and no one ever sang) but there was a lot of music all over. And it was usually very gentle peaceful harmonic music, very atmospheric, nothing like heavy metal or pop music. (No drums or cymbals for that matter.) Maybe the brains of those bodies just hallucinated music all the time? Nobody ever danced to it.

They had only one kind of pet that I saw (I’m not sure how much of the world I actually got to see); those pets were almost like big dogs with horse-like hair running along their backs. And although they scratched and pet these animals, they didn’t really play with them much. Rather the animals were very smart and performed a lot of chores for the people, fetching things and stuff, but they jumped around a lot and loved attention, so much so that the people normally kept them out of the room if they needed to focus on something else.

Though there was not much crime (besides the occasional stealing), the biggest crime seemed to be laziness. I’m not exactly sure how the economy worked, but you were expected to work, at least if you were an adult. If you didn’t work, you were to be shamed. The shaming of others seemed to be the only punishment, but I guess it worked. Being lazy and not contributing something useful to society was very poorly looked upon.

Also, although I didn’t get a sense of much religion, there was a lot of emphasis put on controlling your own emotions, I guess like mindfulness. Adults and children alike were constantly reminded to separate themselves from their negative emotions; you didn’t necessarily have to stop feeling your negative emotions, but you were encouraged to not let them take you over. You were encouraged to be in charge of your emotions.

Overall, I got the sense that this world I was visiting was more spiritually evolved than ours, hence why earthers, such as myself, would visit there. They, on the other hand, would likely learn nothing from visiting earth, as we’re still in the “preschool” of the spiritual universe. They were perhaps more like in “middle school” or “high school”.

Near the end of my visit there, my fellow earthers and I were invited to a school whose teachers and students were the only ones that could somehow tell we were actually visitors from another realm. I’m not sure if education was compulsory there, but at the very least it seemed very stress free and “open”; although adults were in charge, children had a lot of freedom; you could get up and walk around at leisure. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of lecturing, rather “classes” (which did not seem to be organized around any one particular topic at once) were like open conversations, sometimes with children taking notes to answer questions or practice problems. I remember learning some math and translating it in my head to how we would express the same math in our world, and being somewhat confused by how they did it.

Anyway, somehow I could tell my time in that world was coming to an end just as a “test day” was upon us. They had some kind of weird paper at the school where they would hand out tests (which were somehow individualized for each student) and answers could be submitted through the paper. But the paper was still cheap enough that you could rip it up and throw it away. Still, you never needed to hand your paper in, you just needed to say that you were done and the teacher would somehow collect your answers. Maybe the pens kept track of how they moved or they took a picture from somewhere? I don’t know. But somehow the writing on the paper would disappear and the teacher would have your answers.

I kept failing my tests. Everything kept confusing me and the teachers would laugh and give me an easier one. Like there was no real pressure. And we were all allowed to talk and eat during the tests. It was very “open”, almost like a game, although the teachers were still careful to not let anyone cheat, although none of the students seemed to have any desire to anyway, I guess since there were no real punishments for doing poorly.

After I kept on failing different subjects, they finally just gave me one question: “What do you hope to remember the most about visiting this world?” Ironically, I forgot my answer, but it had something to do with emotional control, since they had put so much emphasis on it and it felt so peaceful there. I remember going back over in my head a bunch of things I wanted to remember, even though I forgot most of it. I wanted to remember how long I had been there (two weeks), I wanted to remember the dog-like pets because I thought they were so much fun, I wanted to remember the name of the place (so I could find my fellow dream travelers in this world, although I don’t know if they were even from the same earth time, if they conform to “earth real” at all) but I forgot it. Strangely enough, I remember knowing I would forget most of it because I somehow understood something about how the brain and consciousness works. It was like consciousness was at a higher frequency there, so I understood that very few thoughts and experiences there could be “translated” back to an earth brain. But the visit was still good for the “soul journey” or something.

And then I remember being a bit sad to leave because I had made friends there that I knew I would never see again (in this life anyway) and it was so beautiful and peaceful there, this world is such a cluttered mess by comparison, both visually (brands and marketing and writing everywhere!) and emotionally. At the same time, I was a bit homesick, and I wanted to see other humans again and even our pet cats for that matter. For a moment I was a bit worried about how the journey back would happen; it had been two weeks, surely a lot of earth time had passed, would I wake up in a coma? And how would it feel? Would it be uncomfortable?

Ultimately it felt like nothing. I was standing beside the teachers and students waving goodbye and then I opened my eyes and thought, “just a simple one-night dream, of course”. And “wow, that was extremely weird.”

I then rolled over and went back to sleep and had another “sequel” dream where I visited an old lady who knew who I was and specialized in helping dream travelers get back to earth. She told me that I didn’t really need her, that all my earth memories were fine (I’d already woken up after all), but I was welcome to stay and look around her place, which was filled with earth stuff. She did have one weird device that was shaped like a pinball machine, but when you look into it you see bits of your own memory reflected back at you, and I mostly just saw frogs and turtles. Otherwise she had a TV, a radio, a record player, electric lights, books, etc. A lot of earth stuff that had been missing from that other world. I didn’t spend long there, I just explored the place a bit and then woke up again.

So that was my ultra-weird dream. Definitely wanted to have a record of it.

I woke up this morning staring at the ceiling, and on the ceiling was the clear image of a young woman’s green eye staring back at me.  I blinked my eyes, made sure I was awake, but the image lingered.  After a moment, it faded away, but I thought the incident was rather bizarre and somewhat creepy.  It was as though a random dream image had been burned into my retina so that I could see it even in waking life.  I’ve had minor sleep-deprivation hallucinations before, but this was more vivid than those.  It looked a bit like a fragment of a Vermeer painting:

Some internet searching confirmed that I’m far from the only one to experience this sort of phenomenon.  According to Wikipedia’s article on the hypnopompic state (the state of consciousness leading out of sleep):

When the awakening occurs out of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, in which most dreams occur, the hypnopompic state is sometimes accompanied by lingering vivid imagery.

So, assuming the vision was not actually a dream-seer from another dimension spying into my waking life, or a mystical prophecy that I am to meet and wed a green-eyed beauty (although I’ll leave those possibilities open), I’m guessing a “hypnopompic hallucination” is what it was.

And, come to think of it, I’ve had these sort of hallucinations before — with music.  It’s not uncommon to wake up to beautiful music that isn’t there.  I’ve just never had it with such vivid imagery before.

Oh, and the dream that preceded the hallucination was quite nice.  I was exploring a university campus, but it was in some royal futuristic steampunk world.  The university buildings were like gilded palaces, curved like the sides of pirate ships.  In one room, I witnessed a number of gamers playing a grand war game involving a bunch of little toy soldiers that were moved about a wire mesh grid.  When soldiers from opposing armies clashed and fought, mini-games involving dice and cards were played to determine which piece would defeat the other.  It looked like a lot of fun; I need to design the game for the real world now.