Last weekend when neko trashed Inception as boring and stupid, I said that I had a unique perspective on dreaming that might have given the film special meaning for me.

When I was in kindergarten, I used to have night terrors. I'd wake up screaming from incredibly realistic nightmares about vampires. When I was five, an asshole babysitter watched the old Dracula starring Bela with me, and then hid in the house and scared the shit out of me when I was looking for her. Between that and I could barely conceive of something so horrible as a monster that didn't even do the courtesy to kill and eat you. Now you have to, like Lucy, rise up like a fucking ghoul and snatch babies from their cribs. I missed school due to lack of sleep. I could get to sleep only when the predawn light was creeping over the horizon. I'd sleep between my parents, not because I'd be safe there, but because any vampire attack would likely come from the sides and I'd have a chance to escape while my parents were consumed. I wouldn't eat or drink anything after dark because vampires could have put sleeping pills in it. I had a terrible dread of dreaming.

It became such a problem that I even knew when I was dreaming. Knowing it was a dream didn't help. I could rarely wake myself up as I was so sleep deprived. They were endless, looping dreams that replayed the same nightmarish scenes over and over.

The summer after first grade, I had a breakthrough. I was so frustrated and had gone through the nightmare scenarios so many times, I took control of the dream. In my dream I had a total freak out. I ranted and screamed at the vampires. I smashed through walls and tossed vampires around like rag dolls. It was my dream. Why hadn't I thought of it before? It seamed so easy.

Ever since then, I lucid dream. Depending on how much effort I put into it, I can control the setting, cast and characters of the whole production. I can stop a dream and start a completely new dream at will. If I'm lazy, I'll kind of succumb to the dream and just become a character myself. I'll often snap back out of it and take control again, but sometimes I just ride it out. It's almost more fun that way. After all, I chose the setting and people in the dream. Why shouldn't I play along?

Now most of you have experience this yourselves. But for me, I do it every night. Every single time I dream, I have total control micromanaged to the finest detail. I can extend the dream for a long time too. This, to me, has always seemed like a super power. Now I read about this Arizona asshole being obsessed with lucid dreaming. To him, his dream life was as real as his waking life.

 

When you're dreaming, your brain releases tiny amounts of a psychoactive compound called DMT. It's the reason it's so hard to remember the details about a dream after you've been awake for a while. You can find yourself in the middle of describing a dream and find you can't put the experience into words. That's the DMT. This Jared asshole kept a dream journal so that he could record the details of his dream before he forgets them. I've never done this. If I don't remember the details, I remember the highlights. It's enough for me.

I think the settings find myself in during my lucid dreams tells me a lot about what's going on in my life. My dreams are not tea parties with the Care Bears or indulgent orgies with a cast of thousands. Well, not always, anyway... But my dreams tend to be action packed and when I describe them to my wife, sound to her like nightmares. They don't seem like that to me.

I wonder how long it's going to be before we get to read this asshole's dream journal and what it will tell us.

 

 

The video is from Enter the Void and is Gaspar Noe's experience smoking extracted DMT put on film.