Everyone dreams, whether we remember it or not. Scientists tell us that dreams are the warnings of our subconscious—a means of exploring that which we cannot bring ourselves to say aloud. Religion tells us that dreams can be revelations or assurance from on high. And parents tell us that dreams are nothing at all. They can’t hurt us.
As an imaginative child my mind was prone to wandering, and where wandering minds go, dreams often follow. I tried to believe my parents—these dreams were nothing. A product of staying up late and reading too many scary things. Just the distorted visions of my childish mind. Even though it was no character but the unknowable, no familiar storybook locale but haunted houses and graveyards devoid of friendly faces. They stayed with me, a constant nighttime companion extending beyond my childhood years.
It wasn’t until I’d reached semi-adulthood and the so-called independence of college life that I discovered a way to take back control: lucid dreaming.
Lucid dreaming is an awareness while dreaming that one exists within a reality which does not exist, leading toward the practice of controlling one’s own dreams. Of pushing back against an abstract reality, of instilling one’s will to not only move oneself but even to change elements of a dream that aren’t to your liking. For the me who had been haunted by spectres in the sleeping world since my youth, it seemed like a godsend. An opportunity to take back what was mine. To find some relief.
The first time I attempted to lucid dream, I found myself plagued by a familiar figure. A white lady, clothed in a bleach-white nightgown, lurking at my table side. The white lady had once been the product of a horror movie I’d watched too young and too soon, a woman who visited my dreams every few weeks since middle school. She had never hurt me, but there was menace in her staring and her crooked smile. And now I knew she wasn’t there. That with a single thought, a single action, she was gone. Just like that.
After that, I couldn’t be stopped. I crafted worlds for myself within my dreams, towers erupting from cloud banks and oases where the sun was perpetually just above the waterline. I greeted myself with songs I couldn’t compose in reality, knowledge of notes and chords and instrumentation that I lacked. I could fly, I could change my shape, my species, my very form and being. Each evening felt like a paradise attuned perfectly to me.
What I didn’t know was that when you try to change the dream, the dream fights back.
It began with the skinless man who stood at the foot of the bed. Peeling back layers of his body from muscle to ligaments to the depths of his soul, all while I watched him. Unable to move. Unable to fight. Bearing witness to his beating heart. In the waking world I discovered that sleep paralysis often came with these demons, the product of a mind trapped in the liminal space between the world of dreams and the world we lived in. That lucid dreamers were more prone to fragmented, fitful sleep, and that I should brace myself to expect my sleeping patterns to get even worse from that point onwards.
My night side companion did not stay with me longer than a few days, but as the new cycle of nightmares started I found myself yearning for his return. Fires that blazed and forced me to wake up, drenched in sweat. Frigid snowscapes that left me chilled and chattering, barely able to open my eyelids. In one dream where I encountered a man-eating creature that bit my hand clean off, I woke up to find an open wound on that hand’s index finger. And though I could rouse myself with the idea that what I was experiencing was a dream, it became ever more difficult to awaken. To remember that these dreamscapes were merely dreams.
Then came the layers.
It was a dream. I knew it was a dream. A black void of nothing where I wasn’t able to move—simply float. Everything about this place without light, without sound, without joy, without hope told me I could not have been in reality. After all, in reality there is never truly complete darkness if one’s eyes are uncovered. But this was fine. And all I had to do was wake up. Just open my eyes. Crack the eyelids, wrench them open.
Just wake up and find—
It was a dream. I knew it was a dream. This city of neon lights and buildings carved from shattered glass cannot be reality because bright lights, flashing lights, always burned through my retinas and caused me pain. But here they were blinking every millisecond, nanosecond, and I could withstand their unyielding heat. I could see lumbering zombies around me, shambling corpses in stereotypical decay. And all I had to do was wake up. Just open my eyes.
Crack the eyelids, wrench them open.
Just wake up and find—
Hell. This must have been hell. Everything was aflame and I could feel heat, I could feel pain, but the pain was settling beneath my skin. Sharpened needles that felt only like blunted pinpricks underneath my skin. There were the faces of people I hated, people I loved, staring at me with accusation in their eyes. This was the moment when I started to truly panic. After all, all I had to do was wake up. Just open my eyes. Crack the eyelids, wrench them open.
. . . Right?
Except it felt like an eternity, travelling through each reality, with the knowledge that all I could do was choose to change locales. Every time I thought I would find myself back in the safety of my bed and the comfort of my home, I was reminded once again that this was not reality. This was not even the dream of my choosing. I was a passenger on a train about to crash, helplessly witnessing my demise as it happened right before my eyes. Going through a hundred, a thousand different infinities in the knowledge that I was now at the mercy of my own mind.
I don’t know how it was that my body decided that I was finally done with my torment. Maybe there was some biological function that saved me. The call of nature, the gurgling of my stomach, or some deeply ingrained survival instinct telling me to rouse myself. To pull myself out of this ouroboros of unawakening before I found myself unable to return back to the world of the living at all. But when I awoke I found myself still exhausted, sweating from every pore. Afraid.
Night after night I went through this parade of hellish scenes. An old classroom that towered until it reached the sky. A stream of endless hallways and infinite doors containing ghosts both real and imagined. Back to those frigid and blazing lands. Back through places of aching familiarity and deepest shame. This happened for maybe two weeks, maybe three, but to me they felt like an endless stretch of time where I couldn’t even function during daylight hours for the lack of rest I’d had. A problem that was only fixed when I began to push ever harder in a pre-sleep workout—allowing the testosterone, the lactic acid burn, and ever-pumping adrenaline to become my lullaby.
These nights I don’t dare to sleep until I’m thoroughly exhausted, until I know that I won’t be able to dream. There is a small part of me that misses the freedom of lucid dreams. Of venturing back into a world of my creation. But the fear, more than anything else, keeps me from ever returning. The ever-growing sense that if I dive too deep, I’ll never be able to return to the surface.
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