Adventures in Lucid Dreaming - Part III
The past week or so has been interesting, because, with lucid dreaming firmly on my mind again, I’ve been able to consciously examine some of my dreams and differentiate my experiences with lucid dreaming.
As I’ve mentioned previously, I never really realized that lucid dreaming was unusual, because my lucid dreams tend, at least in my mind, to be extremely mundane. That is, overall the “lucid” part of my dreams is restricted to my real world understanding, as I alluded to in Part II. Generally, the lucidity manifests itself as manipulation, editing or most frequently as a type of problem solving. I’ll use my dream from the other night as an example:
As usual, I was immersed in what would generally be called a nightmare. Even though I realized upon waking that my body was having a marginal stress response to the dream, I very, very rarely feel any real fear from these kinds of dreams, mostly because I’m never not aware that they are dreams, the key to lucid dreaming. In the dream, I went down into my basement, which had somehow transformed into an echo-ey cavern, and was confronted by a twisted, gruesomely disfigured man. He threatened me with a variety of tough guy lines, summoning a couple of hideous supernatural killers from the depths of the cavern. Long story short, I pretended to do his bidding, and when the timing was right, I buried three butter knives in his chest and neck with the line “…and that’s how the movie ends”.
The entire length of the ordeal, I was constantly aware in the back of my mind that none of this was real, which in its own way seems to encourage me to take a puzzle-solving approach to my dreams in general. However, I think I’ve been able to narrow down part of why I’m always aware that these are dreams… throughout the entire length of the dream, I find myself… well, narrating/dictating it, consciously. I hesitate here, because the line between the two is extremely blurred, and there’s a huge component that would essentially best be described as critical commentary. It’s almost as though the experience splits in my mind, with one half of my brain living the dream, so to speak, with the other constantly evaluating the experience, and, perhaps, rewriting it.
Here’s what I mean: as I stabbed the bad guy in the chest, the thought process I was having was something along the lines of “huh, that was easier than expected, but this is just a butter knife, it must have gone in between the ribs, now what?, i think I’ll stab him in the neck, this isn’t gonna work as well,” and so on and so forth. In fact, that last line wasn’t a coincidence. In a way, it functioned as a cue for me to end that dream, a clear decision to kill the process, something I find myself doing often. It is that secondary thought process that convinces me to bail out of dreams that get too boring or stressful, much like you’d hit stop on a DVD player, that rewinds and replays parts of dreams, that edits elements out and that turns every dream into an interactive experience.
The thing is, it’s essentially this backseat dreamer that dominates my waking mind as well. This is my consciousness, and it has similar reactions when watching television or movies, or playing games, or doing anything really. We all have that. So the question remains, why does consciousness check out when some people hit the sack, and not others? I found these interesting (though not extensive) articles that hint at the relationship between lucid dreaming and a strong internal locus of control (that is, the belief that the individual is strongly in control of his or her own existence) as well as a strong need for cognition (the need to organize and structure experience, to make sense of situations).
I’ll use a dating analogy to clarify this last point. Someone with an externalized locus of control and low need for cognition is the type of person that would date one creep after another and explain that as “I just don’t know what’s happening to me, these freaks keep sniffing me out, I just can’t get away from them!”. Someone with a strong internal locus of control and high need for cognition would likely recognize the pattern, focus inward on what he or she was contributing to this scenario, work on changing that, and break the pattern.
I’ve been interested in the link between controlling personalities and lucid dreaming, but I realize that in fact my thesis might be poorly structured. Realistically, it is more likely that some of the characteristics that contribute to and support a controlling personality might overlap with the characteristics that contribute to the ability to have lucid dreams.
In any case, that’s enough for now. I will end this by saying that, surprise, surprise! I finally did fly in my dreams, but that will be a topic for another day.
