Lucidity, Come Back to Me!
illogical, non-sensical or completely whacked-out the contents of my dream journal would be, before I'd read through the first sentence of a dream I'd have remembered it from start to finish. I can clearly envision the entire dream in my minds eye and re-experience the original emotions that I'd felt that night. I can smell that blondes hair again, or remember what it felt like to pop that giant ollie down a 20-set staircase, or relive that horrible fear I felt when my mum and sister left me sitting on a giant, brick wall at some spooky carnival. The more I read over my old dreams, the easier it became to re-remember them.
Only after experiencing my first, natural lucid dream did I become aware of its existence. The first time it happened to me my head was getting stuck into this pretty stock-standard dream where I was just walking around a city. I probably presumed it was Sydney, I guess, but realistically, familiar things in dreams are never what you assumed them to be when you wake up and think about them, are they? Like the dream-home I grew up in, with that porcelain tree-house shower and the indoor swimming-pool that cascaded down to my giant, timber kitchen... that didn't really fucking exist! When I dreamt about it, I remembered it as my old house and was excited to be back there, but when I woke up I thought, 'what the fuck?', my old bathroom had hideous pink tile and the kitchen was fitted out with retro-ass, yellow, laminate bench-tops!
Anyway, as I walked around this 'dream city' I started to notice that I felt like I was in control of my body. So naturally, I slapped myself. It didn't hurt. I did the old pinch-yourself trick too – nothing. 'I'm bloody dreaming', I thought, in my real brain, and realised that in my own dream, I could control everything. I immediately kicked the stranger next to me in the balls as hard as I could and then flew off into the clouds like Superman. Being the lightest sleeper in the history of planet Earth (I used to get woken up by the slightest clicking noise made by my alarm clock and be able to switch it off milliseconds before the radio began to blast) I woke up soon after, unable to maintain control of my lucid state. Lucid dreaming feels like it's on the verge of being awake, so it takes brain and will-power to be able to extend the experience. I had no idea this shit even existed, so how the fuck was I supposed to know how to prolong this trippy, awesome, mind-expanding occurrence? I felt like I'd found a back-door into my brain. I immediately started to search the net for info on what had happened to me. I didn't know what to expect, but to my delightful surprise I found that not only there was a term for it, 'lucid dreaming', but there is a shitload of useful knowledge to absorb on the net about it too. This is where I read about keeping the dream journal. Apparently, the basis of the idea is that the more dreams you write down and remember, the better you become at remembering dreams, and therefore you'll fall into and be able to control these lucid dreams more often. The first part I found to be true, but since that first time, I've barely really experienced a lucid dream again.
My memory can be shoddy at the best of times. In the long-term, though, it's amazing. I can recollect incredibly minute and insignificant details from all manner of situations that I've found myself in since I was a kid. Most of it may be useless, unimportant facts, but some of it is some significant shit! I baffle sometimes people with my detailed memory. People don't believe that I could be so sure of the depth and detail that I recall. Maybe, my brain just makes this shit up, convincing me that I witnessed certain things, but I don't believe that. I believe my brain's as solid as a bloody rock.
My short-term memory, however, is a whole different kettle of fish. Years of binge-drinking, bong-smoking and altering my mind-state has left me with a shrivelled husk of a frontal lobe. In moments of extended sobriety, I'm fine, but put a drop of liquor down my throat, let me lung a few billies or drop some psychadelics, and I'll forget the point of the sentence I'm saying while I'm half-way through saying it. I know 60 year olds that claim to have never blacked out, and these are old hippie blokes who've smoked truckloads of pot and sucked on sheets of acid. I guess they never embraced binge-drinking as much as our generation has, and the hydroponic stuff we smoke mustn't help either, but I've been known to black-out almost every goddamn time I get on the piss – and sometimes that might be just a six-pack or two!
I used to write down all my dreams in a dream journal. Every morning, as soon as I'd woken up, the very first thing I'd do is grab my pen and start scribbling away before I'd forgotten what happened in the dream. With every passing second, the memories of your sleeping fantasies dissolve into the deep void of forgotten memories. Some stick with you your entire life, and others remain poised on the edges of your brain banks, waiting for that trigger to help you remember them. But sadly, most dreams are never remembered - they float off into the night like smoke from a fire.
After a few months of logging my dreams, I became so good at remembering them that I'd be waking up at all hours of the night with a new dream to scribe. Each morning I'd be adding three to five dreams to the journal. A lot of them are pretty indecipherable – your handwriting leaves little to be desired when your eyes are encrusted with gunk and you're still half asleep. No matter how illegible,
I stopped keeping a dream journal years ago, and since I've stopped, my ability to remember my dreams has dropped dramatically. Most mornings I wake up with some tiny trace of my dream left flittering around my skull, but in minutes it'll be gone, replaced with some stressful agenda or the urge to ingest some consumables. The final vestiges of my lucid dreaming abilities have left me, although what I have noticed since then is that we experience lucid dreams more often than we are aware of. In those dreams where I can skate like Andrew Reynolds, or fly around like the man of steel, I'm fully aware and in control of what I'm doing. It's just that I'm having so much fun that I don't take the time to stop and realise that I'm actually in this lucid state where I can control everything I see. And what about those sex dreams. We've all had them. When you're banging the big booty of some bosomy brunette in the middle of a kaleidoscopic circus tent, doggy-style, and you want to flip her over to see her titties bounce - aren't you in control of that situation too? I know I am, but screw me if I'm taking the time out of my fuck-fantasy with five fine females to contemplate the extent and power of my inner-conciousness. I don't get laid enough in reality as it is, so I'm definitely sticking with the dream sex any damn night of the week, even if it isn't actually real.
Sometimes whilst shitting, showering, shaving, driving, or doing something where I won't have a pen in my hand, I'll write things in my head. Sometimes I'll even do it whilst trying to sleep, which does kind of drive me insane, but also inspires me with fresh ideas for the basis of an article or story. Most of it may be crap that doesn't deserve to be etched into a toilet wall, but some of it's just screaming to be written down. I often end up sitting in front of a blank page, staring at it in an intense struggle to retrieve what I'd so eloquently thought out in my head. When the area between my eyes starts to ache, I know the thoughts are lost, and all I can do from there is give up, go back to sleep, and hopefully stumble across another thought that may spark some brilliance in my brain.
Luckily, for me (and I guess you, too) I spent last night on my Nan's floor, next to my laptop and wasn't able to roll over and begin tapping away at my keyboard, then this piece probably would've never been written. It may not be very interesting, well-written, funny, or about much, but it still got written. And if you've read this far, then I've somehow succeeded in managing to maintain your attention for this long, which, in theory, I think, labels me as some kind of genius, doesn't it?
If not, I don't care. I've still got my dreams to entertain me, even if I never remember them any more.
21ST JULY 2013