I was in the park, in my home town, when I realised that I was dreaming.
The shift from non-lucid to lucid is not as dramatic as it used to be. I also noticed how this state of consciousness seemed as unsatisfactory as any other. I found myself thinking ‘this isn’t very vivid’, yet at the same time I saw it was merely a non-vivid experience, not a failure of my experience as such. (How could there be such a thing?)
There were hulking chunks of wreckage strewn about the park, the skeletal and burnt remains of metal vehicles. Between the wreckage crowds of people milled around. To convince myself I was lucid I ran a hand across the hard edge of some burnt metal and received a tactile impression of a kind that never arises in a non-lucid dream.
I stopped a scruffy, geeky-looking man, but took care to pay him all the attention I could. I’ve concluded that it’s not right to overlook a figure in a lucid dream, just because he or she happens to seem human. I made eye-contact and explained a little about my project. He responded warmly. When I asked who was in charge, he pointed me to a uniformed figure: a tall man wearing a military uniform and an identification vest. One the back was a short serial number that I couldn’t read. It was a short sequence of perhaps four or five letters and numbers.
The uniformed man was tall, but not abnormally so. He radiated an air of calm and assurance, which persuaded me of his ultra-human status. I told him who I was and what I’d come to find out. When I said my name he gave a murmur of recognition, which boosted my ego. We sat down on the grass: the man, me, and a couple of people nearby who seemed interested in our conversation.
‘What I’d like you to tell me,’ I said, ‘is whether we’re all the same kind of being, or whether you are different from me and the other humans, or whether we’re all different from each other.’
I immediately realised this kind of talk was a mistake. It was too academic and long-winded. The lucid state, which had seemed stable, was beginning to break down. I tried to focus and prolong it, but everything unravelled.
In retrospect, it was silly to expect and wait for a verbal answer. I could tell from the body-language and reaction to my question that the tall man would have said that all the beings in a lucid dream are capable of different natures. Some are angelic, some human, and some belong to levels below the human.
I had woken, but didn’t open my eyes and so remained close to the dreaming state. I remembered LaBerge’s advice to visualise spinning around on the spot, as a means to prolong lucidity. It worked, to a degree. Because I was already close to the dreaming state, the image of spinning was more vivid than if I’d been more awake. Because it was vivid it made me feel ‘unfixed’ in space, as if there were no possibility of coming to rest anywhere. Our sense of ‘fixity’ is usually provided by our sensory perceptions. ‘The sense of fixity provided by our sensory perceptions’ is another name for what we call ‘reality’. The technique of spinning, then, can keep reality at bay because it enables consciousness to situate itself in the ‘unfixed’ domain of images and imagination, rather than perception.
Suddenly I found myself in my parents’ lounge, late at night. The lights were on but the house was silent. I waited around for a while and willed the tall man to reappear. But no one came and the dream soon faded.
I continued spinning, but spinning was all I could manage. The dream world refused to coalesce. I span for what felt like a long time, hopeful that something would appear. But then my girlfriend made a noise in her sleep and instantly the ability to spin vanished also. The noise was a perception, and with it came the sense of an external world. My proximity to the level of images was terminated and I fell helplessly awake.
That afternoon, whilst we were cooking, I turned to my girlfriend and said: ‘I met another angel in a lucid dream last night.’
Without another word she instantly snatched up the picture of her grandfather from the wall, and said: ‘Was it him?’
The picture was taken during her grandfather’s service in World War One. He is in his military uniform, which includes a peaked cap.
Later, I asked her: ‘Why did you pick up that photograph when I mentioned my dream?’
‘Because he looks like an angel,’ she said.
