Last night I had a lucid dream, the first real one I’ve ever had. I’d had a couple of experiences before where I realized I was dreaming, but I would wake up almost immediately. This was the first time I got to actually hang out for a while.
Here’s how I realized I was dreaming: I was with some friends back home in my parents’ house. We were planning to go on a short hike right in the area. I noticed that it was already about 4:00 pm, which meant we would be hiking in the dark. I made note of that, but it didn’t seem unusual to go on a December night hike. My friend who was sort of leading the pack started taking us on a shortcut over the fence and through my neighbor’s yard. Three of the group went, but one girl and I declined, because the neighbor is a psychopath (true in real life). It was already dark at this point.
I knew a different, slightly longer way to the trail, so I suggested to this girl that we go that way and catch up. We were walking down a familiar street in my neighborhood when I suddenly realized it was high noon—broad daylight. A moment before, it had been pitch dark. I looked around. “This is a dream,” I said. My companion was disbelieving. “Just a second ago it was dark,” I said. “We had been planning to do this whole hike in the dark, and now it’s light out.” The girl with me sort of disappeared as I explained this. It took an intense focus to explain to myself how this all didn’t add up. But eventually my explanation made sense, and I concluded that, yeah, I was in dreamland.
I had always thought that if I ever had a legitimate lucid dream, I would go nuts and do something wild (nearly always sexual in nature). I found last night this was hardly the case. The details of the dreamscape seemed at first too perfect. The neighborhood street I was walking down looked exactly the way it does in real life. I had read before that lucid dreamers often find they can’t read text in their dreams. I tried testing this out on the license plates of the parked cars on the side of the road. I could read every letter and digit clear as a bell. I could even read the text on the license plate frames. One of them just said “congress.org.”
Being able to read and pick out such intricate detail made me second-guess my conclusion that I was dreaming. I didn’t believe my mind could create a world so rich. Maybe I had lost my grip on reality altogether, and the earlier bit with the night hike was just a psychotic fabrication. After all, one of the hallmarks of having lost your mind is not knowing you’ve lost your mind, right? It was seriously unsettling.
I had a few more dreamland adventures, which seemed to last about two hours and which don’t warrant detailed recounting. I was able to do some things I wouldn’t ordinarily do, but there was far less gleeful psychic manipulation than I would have expected. I found that by bringing my conscious self into the dream, I was severely inhibited. I overanalyzed everything, and I didn’t trust my surroundings.
Even though I was able to do some dangerous things without getting hurt, I could tell that I was not in control of the dream. As in any other dream, I would suddenly and inexplicably find myself in strange locations. Realizing my lack of control over the course of the dream further inhibited my actions, because I couldn’t quite believe they would be without consequence. I knew that my actions wouldn’t have any consequences in the real world (If I told my dream boss to fuck himself, I wouldn’t have to face up to it the next day.), but it seemed like they could definitely have consequences in the dream world.
I wasn’t able to simply snap myself awake, and I wasn’t able to instantly transport myself to a happy place. If I took the wrong sort of action in the dream, might that not plunge me into a nightmare? You might think that you couldn’t have a nightmare if you knew it was a dream, but experiences don’t have to be real, per se, to affect us. You know horror movies aren’t real, but they still disturb you. And maybe the nightmare could itself be my lucidity, and an inability to wake. Anyway, I felt no more inclined to take risks than I do in my waking life.
Maybe this all comes from inexperience. Seasoned lucid dreamers claim to be able to manipulate everything in their dreams. As a first-timer, what could I expect? But I’d be curious to know if others haven’t had similar reservations and inhibitions in their lucid dreams. After all, we live in a world built on consequences. You’ve never taken any action that didn’t have a reaction of some kind (cliche, but true). Maybe it’s more difficult than we realize for our minds to create a consequence-free world.
All that being said, I’d gladly repeat the experience, and I look forward to what might course through my head tonight.
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