Today’s post will be a bit different. I’ve spent much of the week sick. The head cold hasn’t been all that bad on its own, but the coughing disrupted my sleep a fair bit.
Appropriately enough, that experience had led me to reflect on the nature of dreams.
I grew up with a lovely worldview. I’ve played with setting it down for a while. This week I’ve tried picking it back up again. It’s relieving to do so, honestly. That view is what I’m going to write about this time.
It can be explained. But I think doing so is actually less clear. Cognitive minds might like that approach, but that’s such a small part of people.
Instead I’d like to show you.
I’ll share a handful of vignettes and reflections. There really is just one theme. The scenes interweave. I invite you to feel their interconnection even if you don’t consciously understand it.
View it like poetry if you like. I think that’s more helpful than looking for theories. Theories can come later. For now, I invite you to enjoy a short journey.
When I was little, I could see the Milky Way from our back yard.
In the 1980s, even in the city the light pollution was low enough that starlight would make the night sky glow. Looking up, I would feel a vastness, drawn in by the stunning silence punctuated with multicolored freckles. Awe would grace my heart.
To this day it still does. Whenever I’m in a place far enough outside the bounds of civilized light. I look up, and my soul sings for home.
As a child, my father would tell me how this was all made for us. How his father would say that this reality is a vacation. “The purpose of life is to have fun!” Sometimes Grandpa would add that when we wake up from this dream, it’ll be time to get back to work — always said with a grin.
My mother once met someone from beyond the stars. It feels impolite to give too many details; I think it was a private visit. You can think of it as a dream if you like. I think that works well enough. But it always stayed with me, the clear impact that the Laughing God left with her. A certainty that this world is not what it seems. That there is a true reality beyond it.
I’m told that the ancient Hermetic wizards and astrologers used to view the night sky as a sphere, with pinpricks in it that let God’s light through. And that the planets and Sun and Moon wander around on that celestial sphere.
There’s something very quaint about that view. I can see why they’d want to see it that way.
It’s really something to behold the night sky with wonder.
Why does it touch me so?
What lies beyond it?
None of these questions quite touch the true ask my heart has here.
I think the real question lives in my heart, and my eyes.
Once, as a pre-teen, my cousin tried to trick me with a ghost story.
We were like brothers. We’d sometimes get in fights and refuse to talk to one another. But we’d leave audio notes for each other on an audio cassette using my boombox.
I still have some of those old audio tapes. Side A is labeled “The Wor of Alex and Michael”. Side B has “WAR” written several times on it. I’d tried to make up for how I’d misspelled “war” on the first side.
One day he told me that his hearing was so sensitive, so acute, that he could hear the dead.
I think he didn’t understand how I would react. I’m guessing he wanted to impress and wow me. And the claim did! But my immediate reaction was less “You’re so amazing!” and more “Oh! So we can investigate stuff!”
There was an old abandoned house at the dead end of the street my family’s home was on. Tucked away inside the blackberry brambles. Our parents forbade us from exploring inside the house. But we’d sometimes traipse near it to take a look.
So naturally Alex claimed that he could hear ghosts inside the house.
When he made that claim, I got excited, and practically dragged him to the house. I wanted to know what they were saying! Who are they? How did they die? What’s it like being a ghost? What do they want?
I kept prodding him with questions, sometimes addressing the ghosts and turning to him to act as the translator. Sometimes we noticed that the wind would blow in ways that seemed like a response from our invisible friends. I honestly don’t know anymore what Alex thought about it all at the time. But I thought it was magical and wonderful.
A little like looking at the stars.
After a while of this, he got tired of the game and told me he didn’t want to be the translator anymore. So I turned to the ghosts I couldn’t see or hear and asked if we could communicate directly. I suggested using the wind as a yes/no sign: wind blows means yes, stillness means no.
“Does that work?” I asked.
Winds blow.
“Great! And just to check: do you want this conversation to end?”
Winds stop.
“Excellent!”
So I continued to chat with the ghosts. I learned a lot about them. They even taught me how to make the winds blow!
For about two years after that it was a lovely trick I would sometimes show my friends. They’d ask me to make a breeze happen while we were hiking so we could cool off.
Sadly, that magic trick vanished shortly after my family moved from that street.
A little while after the incident with the winds, my mother asked me not to talk with Alex about the ghosts down the street. I didn’t know how she’d found out, or what the problem was. But I agreed.
I learned many years later that apparently I’d terrified my cousin. He’d gone to his mother, clearly scared. She extracted enough of the story to call my mom and ask what was going on. It was apparently Alex’s mom that had asked if I could stop frightening him with these ghost stories.
What can I say?
Perhaps it’s unwise to bullshit a young wizard about matters of magic! Reality might not respond how you’re expecting.
I used to dream vividly every night, effortlessly.
And at least once a week, I would have a lucid dream. A dream where I’d recognize it as a dream while it’s happening.
There were recurring themes. If I fell from too great a height, I would fall through the floor, appear miles above our house in the sky, and keep freefalling until zipping through the roof and slamming into my body. If I swore or got angry, the Pain Machine would come from around the corner with a “BAM. BAM. BAM.” sound like an ominous drum, and zap me with an agonizing laser that would wake me up. If I found myself wandering around inside my house, I couldn’t go inside my room or I’d get sucked into my body and the dream would end.
Mostly it was just fun and fascinating though. Wondrous.
A bit of starlight.
My family liked sharing dreams, and talking about dreaming. My parents were jealous of how easily I had lucid dreams. They’d share advice with me and encourage me to keep playing in the dream world.
I had a pretty clear sense as a child that the dream world was just over the eastern horizon. I would go there each night. In my dream body.
When I was a bit older, Dad and I would sit outside in the backyard looking up at the stars. And he would suggest questions that still stick with me.
How do I know that I’m awake?
Have I ever thought I was awake, and then awoken to realize I was actually dreaming?
How do I know that isn’t what’s happening right now?
I find it easy to put my thinking mind to these questions. It’s so clever! It thinks lovely thoughts that I enjoy very much.
But there’s a subtler movement here. One made of wonder.
There have been so, so many times I’ve simply known I was dreaming. I could tell. It wasn’t reasoned. My environment looked totally normal, even by my judgment after waking up. But I knew. I was lucid.
And there have been times I’ve considered whether I’m dreaming, and tested the possibility, and the test came back very conclusive that I am in fact dreaming… and I simply did not believe it. Or I would think the thought “Well, I guess I’m dreaming” but the thought somehow did not make me lucid.
Lucidity is something deeper.
A glimmer of it is in these thoughts. That I can never know I’m awake, but I can know I’m dreaming.
Is this a dream? Right now?
Glimmer.
Glint.
Like a hint of light tickling my soul through the darkness.
A thought experiment:
We know the world we experience comes through our senses. That our brains interpret sensory input and translate it into what we see and touch and so on.
Which means we don’t see the world. We see our brain’s presentation of the world.
We hope that that presentation is somehow “like” the real world. That there really are trees and roads and other people and so on.
But we really can’t know that. Because all we ever see are these presentations.
That’s why things like The Matrix and Boltzmann brains are even plausible. It’s possible, in theory, to induce experiences that have very, very little to do with what’s literally real.
But all of that is pretty abstract. I’d like to suggest a mental trick to make it more concrete, that my father once suggested to me.
In a sense, all the above means that the world you see is inside your head.
Which is to say, the dome of the sky is the inside edge of your skull.
I mean, of course not literally. Don’t take this as a truth claim.
I mean to invite you to try on the view. Not because it’s true. It clearly isn’t. But because it’s suggestive of something true.
Literally everything you see is inside your head. You can literally see that.
It’s like being in a giant dream world.
You’re making the trees, and the people, and even these words.
Now, maybe you’re making all these things because there’s something beyond your head that’s really there. Maybe each thing is a re-presentation.
Or maybe it’s more like desktop icons on your computer, or app icons on your phone. There are no actual icons inside the phone’s circuitry. Those are just how we interpret the interface. (h/t Donald Hoffman.)
Or maybe you’re just dreaming. Maybe it’s all made up.
How would you know? How would you tell that you’re not dreaming?
There’s a tense, contracted way to tackle that question. Firm logic and adherence to ideas. Arguments. Fearfulness. Anger. Certainty that the “sky as skull” view is wrong and can be dismissed.
But I don’t mean a challenge to logic here.
I mean an invitation to taste a bit of wonder.
What lies beyond your head? Beyond the dome of the sky?
There’s a way to hold that question that is very much like looking at the stars.
I’ve met some curious characters in my dreams. Ones that really throw into question my understanding of what dreaming even is. And who or what I am.
For many years, zombies were a recurring theme of my nightmares. Usually I’d be in a house with some other people, and someone would just forget to close one of the doors. It would be infuriating and scary at once. A clear reflection of some of my deeper emotional structures.
In one lucid dream, my friends and I approached a cabin that held the Zombie Master. I was delighted: I’d finally get to see where these nightmares were coming from! We entered and found a charismatic gentleman in a pinstripe suit standing next to a lit fireplace. It was a pleasant scene with an air of danger.
I forget the exact nature of the scene, but he quickly oriented to me and ignored my companions. I named that I am the Dream Master — a common title I use in lucid dreams to let dream figures know I am lucid. And the Zombie Lord laughed.
“No, I’m afraid I am the master of this dream. You are not nearly so lucid as I am.”
And he proceeded to prove it. He could control the dream at least as well as I could, and he could block my lucid dream powers.
It’s very strange, encountering a dream figure who is more lucid than I am.
In another dream, I was fully lucid but basically powerless. I could not levitate or create objects or do even the simplest coincidental summoning. I was in a girl’s kitchen in her apartment, so I turned to her and said
“I’m not consciously creating you, so you must have access to parts of me that I don’t right now. Can you help me gain my lucid dreaming powers?”
She gave some suggestions and then wandered off while I tried them. It took a bit, but they worked. I felt my full power snap into place. I hovered above the kitchen floor and did a few other tests to confirm. I then floated into the living room where the girl had gone and told her
“Thank you. That worked. I’m kind of a god here now, so is there anything I can do for you in return?”
She pondered for a few seconds. And then she replied
“If you could make it so I don’t cease to exist when you wake up, I’d really appreciate that.”
At the time I sort of stammered. I really didn’t know how to do that.
I’m still not sure, honestly. But it’s a wish I’ve taken to heart.
Entering a dream nearly always feels like entering a world to me. Complete with its own history.
In October 2014 I did a breathwork ceremony. It broke my sense of dreams as real and plunged me into a materialist worldview. I didn’t understand what had happened; I just felt devastated and hollow, like all hope had been retroactively erased from reality. Like my home not only had ceased to exist, but had been erased from the past as well.
I stumbled around for several days after that, unable to say anything more coherent about the experience than
“I’m sealed at the bottom of an infinite tomb full of nothing but dust and death forever.”
I’m told this experience is similar to deconversion. Folk who grow up atheist have little idea what it’s like to lose belief in God. It doesn’t feel like learning a clarifying fact about the world. It feels like something has been retroactively stripped from reality. Whereas before the ground supported you via God’s love, now it’s just electromagnetic repulsion and the Pauli exclusion principle — and all those impressions of “God’s love” get reframed as having been delusion.
It’s quite an intense thing, to enter a dream that rewrites the past.
When I look back at the wind gift the ghosts gave me, I’m sure the right way to explain it is something like confirmation bias. I’d notice when it “worked” and would view when it didn’t as a skill issue. Maybe coupled with something kind of like cold reading: if I could subconsciously tell the wind was about to blow, I’d “decide” to try “making” it happen.
That does sound like roughly the right way to rewrite the history of that dream, from this one.
One of the common signs of non-lucidity is believing that the world is exactly as it seems to be. That maybe you were confused before, but now you finally have clarity. The true view of reality.
I do believe that true clarity is possible.
But it cannot come from finding the right story.
Every story is yet another dream. Describing itself as though it is the real world.
The true world beyond your head might not be findable. Perhaps it is. But how could you tell?
But perhaps one can tell if one is lucid.
Humans love stories.
They give texture to life.
“We are at war!” cry the virtuous. “We must defeat the armies of evil!”
Stories of saving the world. Ending atrocities. Purifying Earth of toxins.
Or stories of the simple life. A bit of homesteading, and raising children, and fixing the plumbing yourself.
A girl struggling to express herself through theater. Her friends passionate about the same.
An uncle playing music he loves for a niche audience able to appreciate it.
Endless stories. So many beautiful lives.
One such story involves “self actualization”. A great deal gets said about it these days. The “coaching” industry is built on it.
Whispers of “healing your trauma” and “becoming your true self”.
My, what a fascinating little dream.
I mean no offense to call it such. I cherish every one of these dreams.
It is very alive to me that some little dreams have asked to survive my awakening. They are real. They matter.
At the same time, they are dreams. Most do not appear to be lucid.
It’s curious how rarely the “healing” dream encourages lucidity. I see people drawn in ever more deeply. “Changing the world” by “healing our lineages”. Believing the story ever more fervently.
Perhaps. Perhaps that dream will spread. Maybe it will be a good one.
I wonder what a lucid world would feel like. Where everything is cherished and immersed in, but nothing is fully believed.
I think it could be quite lovely.
Are you dreaming?
Right now. This moment.
Perhaps these words are a reminder to you.
I invite you to look.
Not to consider. That’s a dream mind thinking dream thoughts.
Not with your eyes. What is there to see?
Instead, I invite you to wonder.
To awaken just a little bit.
Even if just for a moment.
My.
Oh my.
The stars are beautiful.
