I had a rather interesting dream last night. In this dream I and a few people I knew were a team of super heroes. We were fighting in a giant flying fortress (the kind that a super villain would have), one which reminded me of the inside of a large hotel.
We actually thought the experience was rather funny because of how easily we were shredding through this fortress. We would look up and see holes in the ceiling that passed through four or five floors and one could see outer space at the hole's end. Two or three of us were on the other side of the flying fortress, happily shredding through the walls.
As I passed into the central chamber of the fortress, I realized we'd actually hollowed the thing out, and this fortress was now nothing more than a skeletal husk of framework floating in space above the Earth. The instant I saw this, I had a semi-lucid moment in which I realized something was off and I started to become aware that this was a dream.
This brief lucid moment caused the dream to momentarily have real world physics, and the fortress suddenly started plummeting to the Earth. I could actually feel the fortress falling. I had butterflies in my stomach. I felt the g-forces build up as the fortress fell and I started lifting up off the floor.
As I was hanging in mid dream-realm air I started to panic. (I was only semi-lucid, so a large part of me still thought this dream fortress was a real place.) I thought to myself "To save myself, I need to fly." and so I took control of my fate by making flight a conscious act.
I brought myself to a halt in mid air, and let the fortress fall to the Earth beneath me.
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For our civilization, the attempt to understand the mind is a very new science. Western culture is not like the civilizations of Africa, Indo-China or MesoAmerica who recognized early on just how important the inner-world of the mind is. These civilizations have almost always viewed the dream realm as being at least as real, if not more so, than the material world that we westerners naively call "the real world." Ever since the days of Greece, Western civilization has been in love with the concept of materialism. (Materialism, meaning that matter and only matter really exists. Matter has value. Different objects are made of different matter and it is therefore possible to be a separate thing. Life is nothing but a biological machine that exists as the sum of its parts, and consciousness is somehow the product of the interaction between matter.) As an extension of materialism, Western Civilization has given almost no value to anything not material, including the workings of the subconscious mind. The Western world view, on the most shallow of levels, appears to be a very stable view even to our supposed "spiritual leaders" who are supposed to know better. When one completely ignores the inner world of their own mind the idea of materialism appears to be "the way things are." It wasn't until the mid-1900s that people like Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr started bringing to the AVERAGE Westerner's attention the concept that materialism might just be a house of cards and that there could be much more to existence than mere particle interactions.
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I bring up the subjects of both my dream, and Western Society's "noob-ness" on the subject of the mind to make a point. It seems like every time the subject of dreams comes up people start making false statements about not being able to do certain things in dreams. Every time I've heard someone say "You can't _____ in a dream." there have been others who are actually doing it, and most of the time one of the people actually doing it is ME.
During the 1980s, a common misconception held by our 'Experts' was that you can't see color in a dream. If someone ever had a dream-like experience in which they wondered if they were awake, it was very common for someone with lots of opinion but no real information to say "What color is my shirt? See? You're awake because you can't see color in a dream." And they would say it so matter-of-factly that most people found it very difficult to debate the issue. But there's a flaw in the theory that you can't see color in a dream and that flaw is that I DREAM IN COLOR. There are even multiple written accounts of people seeing colors in their dreams that are so bright and vivid that nothing in the 'waking' world compares. All one needs to do to read these accounts is to pick up anything written on the subject of lucid dreams. Color also appears in many dream symbolism books as having meaning, so I'm not the only one who sees color in my dreams. It should be noted that one hardly hears anybody voicing this theory anymore.
Today, we have another misconception that the 'experts' keep spreading around. Today's misconception is that you do not feel physical sensations in dreams. People mainly bring this one up as a way to go lucid while in the dream state. They say things like "If you're not certain if you're dreaming or not, pinch yourself. If you feel it then that means you're awake, because you can't feel things while dreaming." This is nonsense. I feel in dreams on a regular basis. I have felt heat, I've felt cold, I've felt touch, I've felt the water I was swimming in, I've felt the ground beneath my feet, I've felt a dream woman's kiss, and perhaps most importantly of all I've felt being dream pinched. Even if you have never felt physical sensation while in the dream state, you only need to study "Wet Dreams" to find all the proof you need. My own experience with wet dreaming as a 12 year old boy felt so real and vivid that I actually thought, at the time, I was losing my virginity. It wasn't until after I was awake and sneaking my bed sheets and underpants into the laundry that I realized it hadn't actually happened in what we call "The real world."
I have also had dreams where I was walking down the street and I could smell the rankor of the people, the gutters, and the back alleys. So you have the sense of smell in dreams too. Although I cannot currently think of any times where I have tasted flavor in a dream, I'm certain there are many people who do it all the time.
Another possible misconception spread by just about everyone today is that "You can't die in a dream." The problem with this statement is, "How do we know?" People keep saying that you always wake up the instant before you experience a dream death. Is it the instant before? What if it's a death where you die instantly? I have had several dream instances where I'm pretty certain I experienced a death. I don't know for a fact that I experienced a dream death, but this is only because I have no point of reference. I know what it feels like to be pinched, so if I'm pinched while dreaming I know that I've been pinched. I've never fallen off a 20 story building and splattered on the pavement below, so I don't know if what I dreamed is like the real experience or not. People like to say "You don't really die in a dream, because if you dream die you just wake up." Once again, how do we know whether or not that's what death is like? How do we know that dying doesn't simply feel like waking up? I certainly read a few accounts of near the experiences that describe death as being exactly like that. Now of coarse there is also the Atheist's view to take into consideration. An Atheist might say something like "You can't die in a dream because when you die there's nothing." This is a valid argument for a materialist to make, but let me pose another question in response. "What does 'nothing' feel like? What is it like to experience nothing?" One time I went in for surgery and, thanks to the anesthetics the doctor gave me, I experienced a case of missing time. I was getting prepped for surgery, and I was sitting in recovery. No observable time had passed. I just was. Perhaps this is why we experience waking up after dream dying? Perhaps we don't wake up after dream dying at all? Perhaps we experience missing time until it's time to get up? (Of coarse I am not saying that time has any relevance in the dream state, I'm only trying to list possibilities here.)
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Now to change modes of thought. Up until now I've been talking about a dream I had and some misconceptions about dreams. But there is an important point that I feel needs to be brought up about dreams. While I do feel physical sensation in the dream state, I don't ALWAYS feel dream sensations. While I have smelled fragrances in dreams, I don't ALWAYS smell dream fragrances. And while I do always see color in dreams, different dreams will have varying degrees of color, and the degree of color seems to be related to how lucid I am. In other words, the more conscious (lucid) I am, the brighter the dream colors are and the more additional senses I seem to have. And what about the people who claim they don't dream at all?
This leads me to pose a hypothesis...
What if your ability to experience the dream world is determined by how consciously aware you are?
I have no idea how accurate this hypothesis is. I've always known that I dream, so I don't know what it's like to be a person who claims not to dream. Perhaps they simply don't remember their dreams? Perhaps they actually don't dream? Now I'm well aware of watching Rapid Eye Movements to determine if you're dreaming and that our scientific community claims that not only does everyone dream but that we must dream in order to stay sane. I actually agree with this particular statement, but it's a mistake to think we know what's going on inside another person's head and our scientific community doesn't exactly have a spotless record when it comes to accuracy or even in the ability to stay scientific in their questioning. Also, I have no idea what the experiences are of people who are far more adept dreamers than I am.
I only have my own experiences to call upon, and my experiences say that the less lucid I am, the more dim (or even forgettable) my dreams are, yet the more lucid I am the more expansive and complete my dream senses become.
So, perhaps when those scientific "dream experts" from the 80s said that it is impossible to see color in a dream, perhaps it's because they were so unconsciousness that THEY really couldn't see color in their dreams? Perhaps when the dream experts of today say that it's impossible to feel pain in a dream, it's because they are unconscious enough that THEY can't feel pain in their dreams. Perhaps the only reason people say that you can't die in a dream is because they are unconscious of their dream deaths? Perhaps the people who don't dream, or can't remember their dreams, are so unconscious that they basically die when they close their eyes?
I don't know, but it's interesting conjecture.
