zeborah

I had a story idea yesterday which I wrote down as "locking prisoners' minds in a labyrinth". Ie a mental labyrinth and Our Protagonist would manage somehow to escape or something, but that's all I got and then I went on to doing other things.

Also at dinner with my family the conversation turned briefly to lucid dreaming.

So last night I had a dream in which I was thinking more about this story and in my dream I realised that the escape method would involve lucid dreaming because the "labyrinth" would essentially be a dream. [Also I learned a writing rule that if you're wanting the story to seem to be about one thing before the Sudden Twist to it being about something else, then the optimum amount to write about the first thing is 1500 words. There was a caveat that if you're writing a short story instead of a novel then it's fewer words, but my dream didn't tell me how many fewer.]

And then this morning I was lying in, enjoying the fact that I could lie in, and dozing, and I had a dream about a... mirror, I think? framed in gilded leather or something, and I realised it was a dream, and wanted to touch it to see what it felt like. And so I tried to reach out but I wasn't actually there because it was just a dream so it was like I was going to have to create my hand out of nothing in order to do it. While I was trying to do that, there was a humming and I thought, "Darn, I'm waking up." But either I didn't actually wake, or I woke and promptly went back to sleep, but then it was a book and I managed with a great effort to reach out and turn a page - it just happened very quickly and jerkily, like there wasn't enough processor power in my brain to simulate my actual hand in proper detail and at proper frames per second.

But I made myself read the book, but it was nonsense like the spam you get which reads like language but isn't. I turned another page and looked at the page numbers - they kept jumping around and I had to concentrate to make them go up in proper increments as I turned them. I came to the middle of a signature and it had been stapled, which made me indignant because it should have been sewn. So I concentrated hard and sort of wiped down the fold and made it sewn -- but it was only sewn in exactly the places the staples had been, which made me laugh as I realised this was a lack of processor power again.

I reached the back of the book, and the endpaper was printed with a map of the city which the book was about, and the person who owned the book had written in "calle" and other labels in Spanish. By this point I think my lucidity had worn off, and shortly after that I woke up.

This is the thing about my lucid dreams: I'm lucid for a while, and then it wears off. And often when I wake I'm not sure whether I was actually aware that it was a dream or if I was just dreaming that I was aware that it was a dream. I don't know if the distinction is meaningful but I think it is because it has a bearing on control.

When I used to read up on lucid dreaming, people would write all sorts of enthusiastic things about it, like how you can do anything you want. And I can't. I knew what a sewn signature was supposed to look like but I couldn't make it that way. More fundamentally, my universe was circumscribed: in that dream, there was nothing except for the book. The book wasn't on anything; I wasn't on anything; my body didn't exist, which is why it was so hard to get my hand there to turn the pages. And it didn't even occur to me that I might want to do something that didn't involve the book.

Once the book ended, so did the dream.

So I wonder if I was actually in control or if I just thought I was? And if I was in control, is my control bound within the limits of the dreamiverse I found myself in? Or could I have travelled to another dreamiverse and it's just a matter of practice?

All of this is fodder for the story, it turns out.