Vanessa had written a post entitled “Lucid Dreams,” and through my comments on there, I was told that lucid dreams are not common and that I’m “special,” which suddenly made my own experiences more interesting to me, so I decided to blog about that.

Lucid Dream (as defined by Wikipedia): Lucid dreaming (lucid from Latin, lux “light”) is the conscious perception of one’s state while dreaming, resulting in a much clearer experience and sometimes enabling direct control over the content of the dream, a realistic world that is to some degree in the control of the dreamer. The complete experience from start to finish is called a lucid dream. Stephen LaBerge, a popular author and experimenter on the subject, has defined it as “dreaming while knowing that you are dreaming.”
LaBerge and his associates have called people who purposely explore the possibilities of lucid dreaming oneironauts (literally from the Greek ονειροναύτες, meaning “dream sailors”).

In 5th grade, I participated in a program called GATE (Gifted And Talented Education), which in one lesson taught us that most or all blind people dream in color, whereas only a percentage of normal-sighted people dream in color. Fascinated, I decided to check my own dream that night. In a dream, I found myself alone in the house I lived in at the time. Remembering the fact I wanted to explore, Dream Cindy walked down the hall to the living room wood coffee table. It was dark in the dream, nighttime, and I couldn’t see very much. I put my hands down on the surface of the coffee table and leaned my face down really close to its surface, trying to see whether the wood grain was in color or black and white. I could not tell, but I didn’t know whether things were colorless because it was dark, or because I was dreaming in black and white. Frustrated, I woke up.

The answer came later as I became nearsighted at the end of junior high. The more my eyeglass prescription increased (hence the worse my eyesight), the more frequently in color I dreamt. I think now, I dream almost exclusively in color.

I’ve had other lucid dreams, mostly in childhood or the early teen days, in which I didn’t like the dream I was in, or I didn’t like the way events were leading in the dream such that the dream was fast becoming a nightmare, so I’ve changed the sequence of events in the dream or lifted myself out of that dream environment into a different dream environment, or simply told myself to wake up out of it. But it seemed that as I did that more and more, I was soon less able to distinguish whether something was a dream. I found myself actually in the dream wondering if I am dreaming. Sometimes I would want to do something in a dream, but then I’d second-guess myself and think, “What if this isn’t a dream, and I end up doing some irreparable damage?” (This quandary was commonly in the form of *really* wanting to kiss some hot celebrity boy who was coming on to me.) And I would err on the side of caution and act conservatively in the dream, turn him down, tell him our worlds could never permanently merge, and then I’d wake up, realize it was all a dream and be pissed that I wasn’t more adventurous. So I developed a rule of thumb. “This is a dream,” I’d tell myself in the dream, “If I can’t remember how I got here, to this point. If I was just plopped into this situation and have no recollection of the process of getting here, then I’m dreaming.” Cuz in real life, I always have clear memories of so-and-so picked me up at my house, we drove down this street, came by this restaurant, and that’s how I’m here chatting and having a burrito. In a dream, you’re just there having the burrito suddenly when the last thing you remember is that you were hanging upside-down from some apple tree petting a sheep. That rule of thumb worked for awhile, and then my dream self started developing fake memories. Dream Cindy would sit there and consider how she got to that situation, to test for memories, and then snapshots of “memories” would appear, and she’d go, “Oh yeah!” when those things never happened to begin with, or they were intermingled with real memories from the day before. And I’d be fooled again.

I think the new rule of thumb should be, “When in doubt, you’re dreaming.” Cuz when I’m awake I never actually wonder if I’m really dreaming.