Have You Had a Lucid Dream?

A lucid dream occurs when you become aware that you are dreaming.  That is, you become lucid.  Lucid dreaming is rare because the brain tends to accept the experience it is having.  To the brain, the experience is real, whether it is a dream reality or a conscious reality.  Here's my dream from Tuesday morning:

I am about to give a training seminar.  All my booklets have been printed.  The seminar organizers are helping me put the desks into a circle.  The participants will be applicants to medical school, but they have not arrived yet.  It is getting time to start and I'm aware that I should review my handouts, but I decide to change first.  I'm wearing a long warm dress, but I seem to have a lighter dress that I want to put on.  There is a washroom behind the seminar area and I go there.  I put on the other dress, and look in the mirror.  I notice I have waist-length hair.  The dress seems shabby though.  I decide to put the long warm dress back on, but when I take off the shabby dress, I find that I am wearing a yellow raincoat underneath it.


In my dream, I see that the raincoat is a clue that I am dreaming.  I recall two previous dreams where I am removing clothes, but keep finding more items of clothing underneath.  


In my dream, I start yelling, "THIS IS A DREAM!! WAKE UP!!"  The dream reality is very strong and wants to pull me back into the dream, but I resist it and I manage to wake myself up with the yelling.


Any other lucid dreamers out there?
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As for those dreams of undressing:  no matter how much I undress, I just can't get naked.   In this dream, I find I am wearing a raincoat underneath my clothes.  If I ask the raincoat what it wants, it replies, "I want to protect you."


Am I am covered by layers and layers of defences keeping me from being truly open and vulnerable?  The message from the dream unsettled me, and yelling myself awake left me feeling Matrix-y the rest of the day.

What Can Our Dreams Tell Us? Part II

Yesterday, on his birthday, Robin told me this dream:

"We were in the shed, cleaning it...organizing things, or looking for something.  A glass carafe from a coffeemaker was sitting in a cardboard box with some papers and garbage.  It caught my eye.  As I was thinking about bringing it into the house, it exploded."

I asked Robin to go back into his dream, become the carafe, and finish these sentences:

• Never refer to me as...
• I need...
• I want...

As the carafe, he said,

• Never refer to me as an unused coffee pot.
• I need grounds!
• I want someone to clean this mess up. 

and, "What are you thinking?" I asked the now-shattered, former coffee pot.  "Life sucks," he said.

The message of the dream was clear:  We need grounds, a reason, a purpose.  And, I guess, nobody's going to clean the mess up, except us, and that sucks.

(See September 7, 2011 for What Do Dreams Tell Us? Part I.)

What Can Dreams Tell Us?

From the time I was 18 till I was about 28, I had a recurring nightmare in which my teeth were falling out.  The nightmare would take a variety of forms:  often I'd be frantically calling a dentist but be unable to get through, sometimes it would be one tooth, sometimes many.  I mentioned this to my dentist and he said, not helpfully, "All my patients have that dream."

Dream dictionaries were equally unhelpful:  fear of death, fear of change, fear of embarrassment.  None of that felt right.

Discussing dreams with a biofeedback therapist, I was told to focus on an object in my dream - "as everything in the dream is a part of you."  She said to get into a deep relaxation state and go back into the dream.  Become the object, then ask yourself, as the object, "What do you need?"

A few weeks after this discussion, I had the nightmare again.  The following day, I went back into the dream and became my tooth, experiencing the world from the tooth's point of view.  I asked my toothy self, "What do you need?"

My tooth said, "I need to have deeper roots."

I never had that nightmare again.