You could call me a veteran lucid dreamer. In fact, I've been doing it for more than a decade.
At the tender age of [5 to 7], precision is lost to me, years old, I consciously chose to lucid dream as a means to deal with a particular nightmare. Now, of course, I wouldn't have known what a "lucid dream" was back then, nor would I have known that it could be used as a tool to handle nightmares, but all I knew was that the shit needed to stop.
Bless my mother's heart for letting such a young kid watch the Sci Fi channel, but that decision proved to be fraught with treachery. You see, somehow, I happened to glimpse the likes of the "Chucky" and "Puppet Master" films and that shit is not supposed to be seen by a child, because a child's world is filled with toys and glimpses of said toys doing horrible things to people will infest a child's mind. Now, the particular characters of the film weren't that meddlesome in my dreams, but somehow their latent evil came to infect my images of Bert and Ernie so that they became corrupted into evil little action figures that tormented me in my dreams: hiding in closets, crawl spaces, attics, and ventilation shafts waiting to strike with little knives or pens and pencils.
Even now, reviewing the memories of those dreams, or my mind's attempts at reconstructions thereof, is putting me on my edge.
But, after a while, I decided that enough was enough and that I would take back the night.
So, before I went to sleep one evening--lying awake in my bed, I played back in my head all the nightmares that had frightened me and resolved to end their power of my sleep. Then, I imagined that I stood against a half circle of all the previously mentioned characters--Bert, Ernie, Chuckie, the puppets--such that I recall in my mind it looking like they were ganged up on me, but in reality I had control over them as if they were brought before me to hear me speak. I envisioned myself telling them that they were not real, that they were merely figments of my imagination and that I wanted them to go away, that they had no power of me because I understood and accepted what they were and what they wanted to do, but that they had to resolve their illusory nature and leave me and mighty reality alone.
Sure enough, it worked. After planting that thought in my mind, it grew into a dream with the same story line. The performance took on the qualities of a particular Daffy Duck cartoon where the Detective Daffy, probably playing a send up of Dick Tracy, has the misfortune of coming face to face with a surreal version of his character's rogue's gallery that, as I recall, frightens him back into the arms of the real, rescuing Daffy from a dream turned nightmare. Now, this isn't to say that I never had another nightmare with these characters afterward, remembered or not, nor did my mind find itself without new material to frighten me. I believe that the same Christmas that my folks got me an N64 and the Ocarina of Time, my younger sister got a rather large plush doll of the character Arthur the Aardvark that I had my sneaking suspicions and fears about, no doubt instigated by my findings in The Dreamlands, fearful already, at such a young age, of what the imagination might conjure.
Still, I had conquered the nightmare at its essence and the images themselves could no longer grip me with terror, though they could certainly revolt me and cause an awful shock, a terrible sweat, and an erratic pulse. Yet, I always came out all the stronger knowing that, to at least some extent, I was in control.
But something else happened. From then on, I began to dream lucidly.
I was able to recognize that I was dreaming and, over time, I was able to perform various feats in the dream world, no doubt aided by my avid passion for playing video games and the controlled unreality that they taught me to interact with.
And this was fun, for a while. As a kid, my ability to participate in my dreams made sleep the ultimate amusement park. But with time came a certain boredom with the obvious repetition of dreams, and the inevitable fact that they were only as substantial as the stock I'd invested--and it was fast becoming pennies only.
As a teenager, trying desperately to grasp at straws of meaning, I decided to let go to the dreams and play along. I knew I was dreaming, and it was still a kind of amusement park--or, more precisely, a virtual reality, but I wanted to take it all in. I wanted to see the whole of the play and the cast and crew that made it happen. I had to go back in and take up the conversation once more.
I started, then, to actively work with my psyche, to explore whatever gurgled up to meet me under the dark sky, and, from there, I've come to get a grasp for what it is that I may be.
So, I ask those of who may be intrigued by the film "Inception" and want to play with their dreams as to whether or not you have the right reasons to do this. You are asking to explore the catacombs of your mind and may finds locked away in there that you did not want to find. I do not merely refer to things you might have dreamt up or even consciously imagined in the past, but I refer to real things chained down there, things you've seen, things you've done. Here there be dragons.
I warn you to be careful, foolish psychonaut, for it is you who might be played with.
No comments:
Post a Comment