The Art of Dreaming I

I love dreaming, and so I love sleeping; it is one of my favourite activities—an interest I share with my cats, who've definitely mastered sleeping... and snoring... yes, one of them snores noisily. Whether they dream, I believe so; the snoring cat, Gersimi, sometimes wake up complaining and shouting and looking angrily at me, possibly she'd had a dream in which I didn't feed her: the worst of all nightmares perhaps; and I've met them in my dreams from time to time.

Mostly my dreams are normal unconscious images and emotions, but now and then I have lucid dreams where I am aware and can direct my will and explore the world in which the dreams take place. The lucidity of the dreams tend to vary between almost unconscious to near awake: where the near unconscious dreams usually return to the unconscious state and are highly chaotic and without much continuity, and the borderline awake state rarely remain dream-state before waking up and tend to have blurred vision with awareness of my physical body. Optimally a state in between unconscious and awake is to prefer in which the vision is clearer and more detailed than the physical world.

Hypnos the God of Dreams

The dream god is the mind which creates the dream world, upholds its laws and invents its story. I choose to call it "god" because that's what best suits its function and description: it is the creator of worlds. There is some kind of mind behind the dreams, it is possibly some aspect of the unconscious or super-conscious; maybe it's an angel, who knows? The Greeks had such a god, and they called him "Hypnos"; whether he was understood as I describe the dream god here is unclear however. Hypnos had three sons: Morpheus, Phobetor and Phantasos; who helped him in governing various aspects of dreams, e.g. Phobetor handled nightmares. Neither of seem to have been handling lucid dreaming: perhaps the Greeks had no concept of lucid dreaming, or that lucid dreams were considered a vision rather than dream? We don't have to believe in any gods to conclude, that there obviously is a mind creating the dreams, and we may as well call this mind Hypnos.

The Natural Laws of Dreams

"It seems" is a phrase best applied to any description of dreaming, because to every conclusion there seems to always be the contradiction; and this should also be considered one of the dream-laws: i.e. when there is a law there is also a balancing anti-law.

The reality in which dreams take place, seems to have some kind of dream-laws similar to the natural laws of the physical world, not in how they work but in that they are there. For example, gravity exists in such a way that objects remain on the ground. It is possible to fly or levitate and to lift objects, but it takes some mental effort. Also, matter in the dream world is solid to some extent, i.e. it's difficult to walk through a wall, but there are tricks how to break the laws: e.g. walking through a wall backwards when you can't see it might work sometimes. Breaking the dream-laws usually requires some element of surprise, so a trick may not work a second time; however for years I've been using Douglas Adams' method of throwing myself to the ground and miss, until flying became second nature and now I usually fly without effort.

An idea could be that the dream-laws are only how Hypnos interprets how the dream reality should be, to make it comprehensible? He imitates the waking reality, as we experience it; yet, we can change the dream-world, so the imitation is only to a degree.

One law that seems to be persistent is to change the dream by focusing the will for a duration of time. This means that there may be some resistance in manifesting a change in the dream: such as materialising an apple in my hand; but by concentrating the will it will eventually turn up one way or the other. The key is focusing for a sufficient amount of time. A great difficulty in this is to avoid waking up because focusing the will also tend to heighten the consciousness.

Dream Energy

Flying often eventually result in some kind of running out of fuel, where I slowly lower to the ground and when landing even walking becomes heavy until finally I lay on the ground incapable of moving at all before awaking. This has nothing to do with ordinary dreaming where it could have some secret meaning, such as fear or insecurity; on the contrary, lucid dreaming contain very little of such symbolic content. My conclusion is that some kind of dream-energy does exist has been confirmed many times when by various means I've succeeded in also invigorating the energy&mbdash;not only raising clarity of vision and potency of will, but also causing a sensation almost similar to taking some very strong drug, with ecstatic emotions and sexual arousal. The sexual arousal make me think that the driving energy in dreams is the sexual energy, and so by raising sexual energy it could possibly also bring more vital lucid dreams; it is at least a theory.

Some Thoughts on Memory

Reasoning in dreams usually is a bit dim, perhaps this is because of the memory which tend to contain memories from the dream reality but far less from the waking reality. There may be some communication between the waking memory and the dream memory, but often it requires a bit of mental effort. For exactly the same reason the dream memory isn't as easily accessible to the waking memory. It might be that the memory is organised so that each mental state has mostly access to the memory of this state; so that when we are happy we mostly remember having always been happy, and when we're depressed we have mostly access to the memory of the depressed state and feels like we've always been depressed. In the dream state I often remember other dreams long since forgotten in the waking state. So, even if we wake up and forget a dream, the dream is still somewhere in the memory, and we may remember the dream when in the dream state again.