I wake up strange
I’m walking down the hall, slowly. Considering. Behind a heavy wooden door decorated with a winking Green Man face is a forest, and the trees are whispering to each other in a language I can almost understand.
No, not that one. Not tonight.
The next door is a colorful beaded curtain, half pulled aside. Beyond it I can see the deck of a small sailboat, blue waves, blue sky. I can smell salt water and hear the sound of seagulls.
Hm… perhaps. Let’s see what else we have tonight.
Another step past the sun and surf is a door of ice, solid and dark and cold. It stands slightly ajar, and snowflakes are drifting onto the wooden floorboards, chilling my toes.
I think myself into some fuzzy socks, smile, and move on. I’m not feeling up for a winter adventure tonight.
I choose my dreams, when I can. There’s a house of doors in my mind, and I’ll happily wander its hallways, peeking through keyholes and rattling doorknobs and stepping into worlds I can scarcely believe live inside my head. Sometimes I flit from one dream to another, shaking off basketball sized pollen grains from the oversized garden and wandering into a nightclub filled with music and flashing lights and books boogieing down on the dance floor.
Usually, though, a visit to this place takes one of two directions:
I’ll choose a dream to have, and go be lucid in it. Once I’m through one of those doors, I often let dream logic carry me along until something sparks my interest and I want to explore it more closely and direct the action more personally.
Or I’ll go up to my bedroom, to the world’s most comfortable bed (by definition, as far as I’m concerned), and curl up and go to sleep. I know it sounds boring, considering - I can control my dreams! Choose my own adventure while I’m sleeping! But choosing to sleep in a lucid dream state guarantees that I’ll wake up rested, energized, and happy. It’s blissful sleep. It’s safe.
Getting to the house at all, though, that’s the tricky bit. And that’s why I tell people I am a “semi-lucid dreamer”. In any normal old dream, I can’t just wake up in it and take control to grow wings or fill the air with pretty bubbles or whatever. It doesn’t work that way for me. There’s a process, and for me it’s fairly involved. What it really comes down to, though, is finding a state of Flow, right at the threshold of sleep.
Flow is one of those things that’s hard to describe, but easy to recognize (like porn?). You’re focused and concentrating, but not analyzing every single thing you do. When you have Flow, things seem to just come together, to work naturally. It’s graceful, natural, and (all too often) fleeting.
Because Flow is usually a mental state associated with actually doing things (examples: dancing, hulahooping, painting, writing, running, etc.) rather than, say, falling asleep, it’s always been extra difficult for me to explain it to folks. For me, though, keeping my mind engaged in a specific process while I drift off makes it possible for me to reach that special place, my house of doors, where all my dreams live and I have the power.
My process is literally a journey - there are several different paths I can take, through wildly different mental places. None of these places exist in the real world, but I’ve traversed them so many times as I drift off, that I could draw you detailed maps (which is really saying something, since my cartography skills are not what I would call excellent). When I decide that I want to visit the house of doors, what I’m really saying is that I want to go to the place that most fits the word “Home” for me. So when I want to go Home, I choose one of the paths. It doesn’t really matter which one - what matters is the choice.
Laying in the dark, listening to my breath and the quiet hum of noises in the house around me, I’ll visualize the start of the path.
There’s a grassy field, just outside a low stone cave. The ground is muddy, the sky is overcast, and the air smells like rain. I move myself along the route - into the cave, into the dark, past the obstacles. I can feel the way my body moves, feel myself in the scene. I imagine myself there as fully as I can.
There are traps, distractions, pitfalls both literal and figurative. I leave behind certain things at certain points - a shout into the darkness that echoes off the walls early on, my fear of being lost earlier than that. Every journey involves some small amount of sacrifice, of change. There’s a constant forward motion, a sense of progress. I could abandon the path at any moment. But I’m on my way Home. And I want to go.
I end up eventually in a mineral-heavy lake, trailing light green phosphorescence as I swim to the center and look up. The darkness is a window, and there’s the house. The scene tilts, shifts, and I am seeing it not from above, but from the front. The porch swing creaks in a soft breeze and I’m squinting at all the light. I shake my head, shimmy my hips to shed them of water, and don’t look back at the lake I was just floating in, now impossibly vertical behind me. That’s not important. It’s all about moving forward, about going Home.
I first took that particular trip when I was perhaps four years old. I spend many nights, as I’m suspended between dreams and waking, just exploring different mental landscapes, looking for other routes to the heart of my dreams. I don’t always make it, even when I’m walking a path I know well. But for me, it’s the journey that matters, especially when it’s only my mind that’s moving.
If I pause in the forest near the Great Tree, and follow after the bright flashes of color that catch my eye? That’s ok. I’ll dream of butterflies and spaceships and politics and distraction, and while I won’t be lucid, it’ll still be the dream I needed to have. Likewise, my tendency to stop and chat with the stone golems guarding the Broken City, to let them cup me in their giant hands and hide me for a time from all the things I dodge in those streets as I look for the Twisting Stair, is not a sign of weak resolve. The Flow might falter there, but moving even that far along one of the paths makes my sleep better, my dreams more vivid.
I can’t force it. I often feel that I can barely describe it, much less explain it. But I invite you to try it - as you watch the speckled darkness behind your eyes, think of a journey, a purposeful meander through yourself. Imagine a destination where all your those strange fears and random impulses and crazy images live, your own personal equivalent of my House of Doors. Chart a course from point A to Z. Focus, but don’t think too much, now.
Go.
~~~
If you’d like to learn more about the way people who aren’t me do lucid dreaming, this site has some good resources, and doesn’t seem like it’s trying to sell something.
This entry is an intersection with kandigurl. Go here to read more about her experience of flow!
No, not that one. Not tonight.
The next door is a colorful beaded curtain, half pulled aside. Beyond it I can see the deck of a small sailboat, blue waves, blue sky. I can smell salt water and hear the sound of seagulls.
Hm… perhaps. Let’s see what else we have tonight.
Another step past the sun and surf is a door of ice, solid and dark and cold. It stands slightly ajar, and snowflakes are drifting onto the wooden floorboards, chilling my toes.
I think myself into some fuzzy socks, smile, and move on. I’m not feeling up for a winter adventure tonight.
I choose my dreams, when I can. There’s a house of doors in my mind, and I’ll happily wander its hallways, peeking through keyholes and rattling doorknobs and stepping into worlds I can scarcely believe live inside my head. Sometimes I flit from one dream to another, shaking off basketball sized pollen grains from the oversized garden and wandering into a nightclub filled with music and flashing lights and books boogieing down on the dance floor.
Usually, though, a visit to this place takes one of two directions:
I’ll choose a dream to have, and go be lucid in it. Once I’m through one of those doors, I often let dream logic carry me along until something sparks my interest and I want to explore it more closely and direct the action more personally.
Or I’ll go up to my bedroom, to the world’s most comfortable bed (by definition, as far as I’m concerned), and curl up and go to sleep. I know it sounds boring, considering - I can control my dreams! Choose my own adventure while I’m sleeping! But choosing to sleep in a lucid dream state guarantees that I’ll wake up rested, energized, and happy. It’s blissful sleep. It’s safe.
Getting to the house at all, though, that’s the tricky bit. And that’s why I tell people I am a “semi-lucid dreamer”. In any normal old dream, I can’t just wake up in it and take control to grow wings or fill the air with pretty bubbles or whatever. It doesn’t work that way for me. There’s a process, and for me it’s fairly involved. What it really comes down to, though, is finding a state of Flow, right at the threshold of sleep.
Flow is one of those things that’s hard to describe, but easy to recognize (like porn?). You’re focused and concentrating, but not analyzing every single thing you do. When you have Flow, things seem to just come together, to work naturally. It’s graceful, natural, and (all too often) fleeting.
Because Flow is usually a mental state associated with actually doing things (examples: dancing, hulahooping, painting, writing, running, etc.) rather than, say, falling asleep, it’s always been extra difficult for me to explain it to folks. For me, though, keeping my mind engaged in a specific process while I drift off makes it possible for me to reach that special place, my house of doors, where all my dreams live and I have the power.
My process is literally a journey - there are several different paths I can take, through wildly different mental places. None of these places exist in the real world, but I’ve traversed them so many times as I drift off, that I could draw you detailed maps (which is really saying something, since my cartography skills are not what I would call excellent). When I decide that I want to visit the house of doors, what I’m really saying is that I want to go to the place that most fits the word “Home” for me. So when I want to go Home, I choose one of the paths. It doesn’t really matter which one - what matters is the choice.
Laying in the dark, listening to my breath and the quiet hum of noises in the house around me, I’ll visualize the start of the path.
There’s a grassy field, just outside a low stone cave. The ground is muddy, the sky is overcast, and the air smells like rain. I move myself along the route - into the cave, into the dark, past the obstacles. I can feel the way my body moves, feel myself in the scene. I imagine myself there as fully as I can.
There are traps, distractions, pitfalls both literal and figurative. I leave behind certain things at certain points - a shout into the darkness that echoes off the walls early on, my fear of being lost earlier than that. Every journey involves some small amount of sacrifice, of change. There’s a constant forward motion, a sense of progress. I could abandon the path at any moment. But I’m on my way Home. And I want to go.
I end up eventually in a mineral-heavy lake, trailing light green phosphorescence as I swim to the center and look up. The darkness is a window, and there’s the house. The scene tilts, shifts, and I am seeing it not from above, but from the front. The porch swing creaks in a soft breeze and I’m squinting at all the light. I shake my head, shimmy my hips to shed them of water, and don’t look back at the lake I was just floating in, now impossibly vertical behind me. That’s not important. It’s all about moving forward, about going Home.
I first took that particular trip when I was perhaps four years old. I spend many nights, as I’m suspended between dreams and waking, just exploring different mental landscapes, looking for other routes to the heart of my dreams. I don’t always make it, even when I’m walking a path I know well. But for me, it’s the journey that matters, especially when it’s only my mind that’s moving.
If I pause in the forest near the Great Tree, and follow after the bright flashes of color that catch my eye? That’s ok. I’ll dream of butterflies and spaceships and politics and distraction, and while I won’t be lucid, it’ll still be the dream I needed to have. Likewise, my tendency to stop and chat with the stone golems guarding the Broken City, to let them cup me in their giant hands and hide me for a time from all the things I dodge in those streets as I look for the Twisting Stair, is not a sign of weak resolve. The Flow might falter there, but moving even that far along one of the paths makes my sleep better, my dreams more vivid.
I can’t force it. I often feel that I can barely describe it, much less explain it. But I invite you to try it - as you watch the speckled darkness behind your eyes, think of a journey, a purposeful meander through yourself. Imagine a destination where all your those strange fears and random impulses and crazy images live, your own personal equivalent of my House of Doors. Chart a course from point A to Z. Focus, but don’t think too much, now.
Go.
~~~
If you’d like to learn more about the way people who aren’t me do lucid dreaming, this site has some good resources, and doesn’t seem like it’s trying to sell something.
This entry is an intersection with kandigurl. Go here to read more about her experience of flow!