“Such is your luck, such are you called to see, and let it come rough or smooth,
you must surely bear it.”
— Nat Turner
Having Semi-Lucid Conversations
In a dream, I am driving a car but having difficulty finding the steering wheel. Though it is right in front of me it is at an odd, low position, and only consists of a small arc of a circle. Cresting a hill, the road drops precipitously cutting across the mountainside, descending into a valley, though an urban area densely built-up on the slope. Seeing a road branching off uphill and right, I turn onto it and slow to a crawl, looking for a place to park.
I turn left, crossing a small bridge over a canal that runs along the hillside. Again pointing downhill, I turn the car around and park, pointing uphill. I go off in search of something.
I find myself at a clinic for people with neurological damage. The ground is not so steep here, but I’m still in the same area. I watch as a client is being coached in learning to walk with coordination. I notice I seem to be having some trouble coordinating my knees.
On my return to the car, I discover I cannot find it. I think I’m at the location where I parked but the car is not there. Everything looks the same but I’m unsure, so I decide to look around and maybe ask for directions.
Nearby, I enter a complicated building, maybe a residence or establishment. I find myself confronted by turns and passages, doors, windows, stairs, cabinets. Nothing is at right angles, all at different heights. I cannot get a sense of where things lead or what’s going on.
A door opens and an Asian man exits from a cabinet and goes past. I try to enter the cabinet and the passageway to which it opens. I can see daylight through the opening, but it’s only 2-inches wide and impossible to enter.
I’m with my young teenage son who, in the dream, is now 10. That’s the age at which I had traveled with his older brother. We enter a cafe or pub somewhere inside the building. It’s unclear how we got in or how we might get out. The room is full of people and, at first, I look for an exit.
I find two doors that look promising, one leads to a patio at the same level and the other down some steps and perhaps to the street. I’m considering which exit to take when a woman seated at a table tells me she’d be happy to show me around the neighborhood. She is a middle aged woman with dark hair and a somewhat dowdy appearance.
I tell her that I’d love to accept, but I first want to find my car. If I can, then I’ll come back and join her. We exchange a few more warm words and I assure her that I’m not making an excuse. I greatly appreciate her offer, and I will try to come back.
I call to my son, who seems to have gone off. He does not respond and I worry that he is or will become lost, as I am. I decide to take the lower exit from the cafe. I descend, exit through a car-sized opening, and find myself on a street that also crosses the canal. I feel that while this isn’t where I parked the car, it’s probably close.
My son is there playing with someone he’s found in the neighborhood. I follow them down a precarious hillside that leads off the road and works downhill following a low wall. The friend he’s found appears to be an attractive, short-haired girl. She looks at me radiantly and my son says, “She heard you speak and was impressed that you knew so many languages!”
Her face is adorned with face paint, sparkles, or tattoos in a kind of starburst pattern of many colors. As I look directly at her, I notice her features are somewhat distorted. Her face is thin and long.
The abstract starburst patterns are not painted on but are some sort of skin pigmentation. I say to her, “Where did you hear me speak? I don’t really know many languages. I once spoke other languages but now I only speak English.”
She looks at me blankly, her face going slack and losing the sparkle. She seems disappointed or uncomfortable. I quickly add, “Oh, you must mean I speak with a knowledge of other systems and attitudes.”
She recovers her engagement and enthusiasm. Her face sparkles again and the dream ends.
Having Conversations with People Who Are Not Yourself
The above dream was unusual in its length and continuity. Everything happened in the same vicinity and everything was consistent, at least to the extent that I could understand it. The dream repeated the same themes and the two conversations addressed issues of both my real and dream realities.
Once you become adept at remembering dreams, you start to have dreams in which you go to places you’ve never been, meet conversants you’ve never before encountered, and receive messages that are unexpected and perhaps beyond understanding. The longer the dream you remember, the more coherent it becomes.
As a person trained in the hard sciences, I have no trouble accepting things that are completely strange and make no sense. You might think people who are practiced in the hard sciences are rigid in the realities they’ll accept, but that’s only true of people who are less able and open minded.
A good scientist accepts everything at face value, and then tries to make something of it. In fact, a great scientist lives in a world where the most important things make no sense.
I completely understand why some people believe in ghosts, aliens, and supernatural entities. The inner world is full of them and, as we know from our dreams, the reality of the inner world can be entirely convincing. So, the scientific thing to say is, “Fine, let it be another reality. What can I learn from it?”
The conversations I have with dream characters usually shake my reality. These are dialogs in which I’m semi-consciously involved, not situations where I’m simply a witness or bystander. I am convinced I’m speaking with someone who is not myself, who may inhabit a world that’s foreign to me, and who may know things that I don’t.
I do not mean there is a real, physical world in some parallel universe, a realm of the spirits, or wormhole to another dimension. These other worlds are immaterial because, in truth, the world of my mind is immaterial. I have yet to meet a spirit or entity in my dreams who is inconvenienced by the needs of a physical body. They do not misplace their keys, wash the dishes, or need to use the restroom.
If you’d like to work with your dreams to understand yourself, then…
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