Tortured Dreaming

I tend to be a lucid dreamer. Not all the time. But often enough. What makes lucid dreaming different is that in the dream you are aware that you are dreaming and you can interact with the dream at a more conscious level. Lucid dreaming has been established in the laboratory.

There was a time when some experts denied lucid dreaming even existed. We have learned a lot about dreaming in the last few years. Did you know that the idea that people dream in black and white did not exist until the advent of black and white movies and television?

My most interesting lucid dream dealt with the dreamscape itself. I was fully aware that I was dreaming, and my goal in the dream was to explore the dreamscape in detail. As someone who has done a lot of 3D design creating 3D worlds, I was curious as to how detailed this world was. I wandered around in the dream making a point of noting the details.

The outdoor environment was filled with trees. I walked around a tree and studied the bark. It went all the way around without a seem or repeating the texture. The lives were individual and different, not just the repeating of the same leaf over and over.

I was studying what was in the dream, not consciously creating it. I walked up to signs to see if I could read them. I wandered into a restaurant and picked up the menu and read it. The level of detail in the dream was astonishing to me. And then I woke up.

In a journal from my teens, I wrote about a dream where I was in a bookstore, and aware that I was dreaming. I was astonished that I could pull books off of the shelves and sit down and read them.

Sometimes I wake up from a dream because in the dream I become annoyed with its lack of internal consistency. It is like getting disgusted by a movie and walking out. Other times I simply back up the dream so that it can go in a different direction. I have never had the kind of control over a dream that you saw in Inception, though. It would be cool to actively construct the dreamscape. For me, lucid dreaming is about having an awareness that I am dreaming and having conscious control over my own actions. The dream usually does what it wants.

Most of my dreams are not lucid, though. They are like movies, rich in visual details complete with camera moves and other visual narrative devices. My point of view might switch between characters. Usually, though, I take on the role of a specific character in the story. Complex plots involve science fiction themes, or spy stories, or mysteries. Sometimes the stories themselves are pretty good. To me, dreams are a form of entertainment and quite enjoyable. Only rarely do they reflect upon my real life in any obvious way.

My dreams often have a sense of humor. In traveling across a post-apocalyptic world our goal was to meet the man who by heredity was king of this area. Hanging on the wall of his home was proof- a faded photograph of his great great grandmother being crowned Miss America.

I also don't have nightmares. Yes, I have very scary dreams, but I never feel completely out of control. There is always a goal in my dreams in the narrative that I am working towards. I always have options. I am never a passive character of simply a victim.

My dreams are very sensate. They are richly visual with detailed environments to look at. There are smells, and sounds. And when I fall in a dream and hit, I don't wake up, but I feel the sensation of slamming into the ground and the attendant pain. When a spaceship takes off, I feel the acceleration pushing me down into my seat. If I am in a fight and someone hits me, it hurts.

With my fibromyalgia, a new theme has entered my dream life. Horror. I tended to have adventurous dreams, but did not typically delve into the horrific or truly frightening. That changed.

When I was a child, I had a dream in which I heard cats fighting outside my window. I opened the window and a man grabbed me, pulling me out and running off with me. This startled me awake, only to hear the sounds of cats fighting outside my window. I had incorporated the sound into my dream.

In a much more recent dream, I was sitting outside a motel room and could hear a person snoring loudly inside. I got up to get away from the sound, but no matter where I went the sound followed me. I had incorporated my wife's snoring into my dream.

It is not just sound that can be incorporated into a dream. Sometimes at night my fibropain is pretty bad. There is nothing you can take for it, and you struggle your way into sleep. That does not always offer me any escape, though. I have incorporated that pain into my dreams. Hideous creatures capture me and stab me all over with their sharp spines. I am tortured in numerous fiendish ways. I might be thrown about leaving me battered and bruised. Fibro pain comes in a wide variety of sensations, and I have been very creative in incorporating it into a lot of different scenarios.

I sometimes refer to these as torture dreams. And you might think this sounds horrible. I see it differently. Pain is a part of my daily life. There is no such thing as a day without pain. And all my pain is pointless. It has no meaning. But in these dreams, which are also exciting and scary, I work through that pain. In the dreams, pain is caused by something. I might be trying to escape from rublle, or fighting a monster or evil villain. I struggle to prevail. I fight and often I do escape. The dreams are not of futility, but about a battle against whatever in the dream is causing the pain. Instead of the utter futility of my normal pain, in these dreams I have something or someone to actual struggle against. In a way, these dreams give me some of the only victories I ever seem to have with this condition.