Writing Dreams (Workshop Essay)

What are dreams?

It's not such a simple question. Think about it for a second. During our waking moments we perceive all around us as reality. We know that the people, the buildings, the trees, the earth, and the sky are all tangible things. We accept gravity and the limitations it imposes on us and our lives. You drop a ball and it will fall to the ground. Birds can fly and we cannot. Fish can breathe underwater and we humans are stuck on land. Rarely if ever do we question whether the rules of our world make sense.

Yet, this is also the way it is when we’re in the dream world. There are no constant rules that ever apply, yet we almost always accept the events that occur there as reality, or at least we do while they are happening. I have met animal human hybrids, flown through the skies on an airplane that could fit through an open window, and fought in wars against an army of Alice in Wonderland card warriors. Any of these should’ve shocked me into questioning the reality of my world, but when I was dreaming about them I had no doubts about their authenticity. I only recognized how impossible they were when I awoke from my slumber. To me, those dreams were as real as any reality that I had experienced in my 20 years of life.

This brings me to the question: How real is reality, when we have trouble deciphering the difference between reality and fiction? That’s all dreams are after all aren’t they. Fictional events that we perceive as real. Our minds create these fictional situations and stories much as a writer would create the plot to a novel, albeit an extremely jumbled and scattered novel. Instead of reading about the events taking place we are placed into them, and are told (by our minds) that what we are experiencing is real. There is no protagonist to root for, as we are the main characters in every story. Sometimes our minds even decide to write our dream stories in the third person, and we witness ourselves living out the events from somewhere outside our bodies. (If this has never happened to you it’s so surreal that it’s hard to explain. It’s another experience that should certainly make us realize the impossibility of a dream, though it rarely does.) Our minds may decide to write a horror story one night, a comedy the next and then a sultry romance the night after that, and we are stuck in whatever role that we are thrown in. These stories created by our minds unfold in ways that sometimes leave us breathless, excited,  or relieved, just as a good book often will.

I started thinking about these similarities between a fiction story and a dream, and it made me wonder… would it be possible to take over control from my subconscious and compose my dreams the way I wanted them to be? It seemed like a ridiculous question when it first popped into my mind, but one day I found an article online on lucid dreaming. I had never heard of this phrase, but as I began to read I started to become excited. Lucid dreaming, it said, was the ability to recognize that you’re dreaming, and then control the events of your dream. The possibilities were limited only by the boundaries of the dreamer’s imagination, and the best part: it was possible to train yourself to develop this ability. I was ecstatic! I immediately decided that I would train myself to lucid dream, no matter what it took, and experiment with this whole new world of unlimited boundaries.

I started keeping a dream journal and wrote down every dream that I could remember. Whenever I woke up during the night or in the morning I would record everything that I retained in my memory. This was supposed to allow me to remember my dreams more vividly each night, and it began to have an effect. I began to remember three or four dreams a night, and I recorded each one in my notebook. Contrary to what one may think, everyone has several dreams a night, even when they can’t remember a single one. As I became more in touch with my night time world, I increased my chances for becoming lucid during a dream. I also tried to look for visual clues to show that I was dreaming. In the dream world letters and numbers never stay constant, so if you look at a book or a clock, look away for a moment, and then look back, the letters/numbers will have changed if you are dreaming. This should allow you to become aware that you are in a dream, and hopefully achieve lucidity. You have to truly believe that you are in a dream though, or it won’t work. For a month or two when I was first trying to become lucid, I would randomly glance at words or letters to see if I was dreaming, but unfortunately I was always in reality.

When I finally achieved my lucidity one night, it wasn’t through the use of any of the techniques that I had read about, though I do give credit to my dream journal for allowing me to become more comfortable with the dream world. I was in my bed in my room at home, and for some reason there was a river flowing across my floor that gushed out of my doorway in a waterfall. As I sat there in my bed, the simple idea occurred to me that I was dreaming, because there wasn’t a river in my room.

As soon as this thought crossed my mind I sprang to my feet and I realized that I was lucid. I was aware that I was dreaming. It was a shocking realization, because it meant that I had control over my body in the dream, while back in reality my physical body was asleep. Even more shocking was the fact that I could literally do anything that I wanted. Anything. No consequences. This possibility simply doesn’t exist in the real world. I had the power to write any story I wanted. I could be the hero, the villain, the observer. I could run my dreams in whatever setting I wanted, from blazing deserts to the bottom of the ocean. The world wasn’t the limit. My imagination was.  

Smiling from ear to ear, I jumped off my bed… and flew out the door.