Lucid Screaming
I’ve been to The Matrix, and it was a pretty fucking terrifying experience.
Lucid dreaming, any number of websites will tell you, is dreaming while being aware you’re dreaming. I’ve never consciously tried to induce them, but I’d read about all the wonderful things you could do while controlling your own dream. One technique for inducing lucid dreams is taking a nap a little while after you’ve woken from insufficient sleep, and that’s the technique I inadvertently used yesterday. I got to sleep way too late and woke up too early for my liking, went to school for a couple of hours (last day before summer break), and returned home. Determined to make up for the night’s miserable lack of rest, I took a nap, which turned out to be a real, live, lucid dream.
The dream was chaotic, and there were many elements and phases to it that I don’t remember. I remember there was an island, and on that island was a large shack that was also a shop, and a lot of my relatives were there. Three of those relatives had babies they don’t have in real life, and one of those babies was a stick man, a few inches tall, with a large round head and paper thin arms and legs that looked and felt like fly legs. I remarked to myself that this was really, really odd: in the dream logic, the weird thing wasn’t that someone had a stick man for a baby, but that I had held another baby a little while before that looked like a real baby, and babies had to be either ordinary or stick men, it didn’t make any sense that they could be either. A little while later, I was outside the shack, and I realized I was dreaming.
By this point I was seriously freaked out about the whole surreal world I was in. A lot of people, when they have their first lucid dream, get so excited that they wake up. I wish I had. Instead, I tried flying. Turns out you can have a lucid dream without being able to control the dream. Instead of taking off like Superman, I ended up flailing about in midair like I was trying to cycle, and then falling to the ground. The dream characters must have been laughing their asses off.
It’s hard to describe the kind of claustrophic feeling that enveloped me at that moment. I’ve searched the internet far and wide, and I haven’t found anyone whose lucid dream turned out that bad. In fact, lucid dreaming is often recommended as a way of dissolving nightmares, but for me, the fact that I was lucid dreaming was the nightmare. I was trapped in a surreal world with unpredictable and uncontrollable imagery; I knew it wasn’t real; and there was nothing I could do to control or escape it. Trapped in your own subconscious. It felt like what I imagine being schizophrenic and knowing it would feel, with apologies to people with actual experience with schizophrenia, which is probably nothing like what I imagine it to be.
I actually recently finished reading a book with a similar theme: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. In the book (spoiler!), the narrator is a “calcutec” who encrypts information by a sci-fi process that sends the data through his subconscious. Parallel to this, another unnamed narrator tries to find his place in The End of the World, a surreal town surrounded by a high wall where no one dies, unicorns roam the nearby marshes, and where his assigned role is to “read old dreams” from the craniums of dead unicorns. As the book progresses, it turns out that the two narrators (surprise, surprise) are the same, and the End of the World sequences actually take place in the calcutec’s subconscious; the crazy professor who invented the encryption scheme has, in the process of preparing the narrator’s mind for the encryption procedure, made a mistake that traps the narrator’s mind in a fantasy world created by his subconscious. In a move I can’t for the life of me understand, the narrator in the end elects to stay at The End of the World when faced with an opportunity to escape along with his shadow (did I mention they cut off people’s shadows, which represent their souls, when they enter town?).
I empathically did not want to stay in my own subconscious. The whole place was giving me a creepy vibe, and besides, it wasn’t real, and if you knew you were living in The Matrix, wouldn’t you want to escape as fast as possible? I explored the island, trying to find a way out. At some point, I met a guy who looked a whole lot like a classmate of mine, though how I knew that I can’t say, since I can’t remember how he looked or if he even had a face. I’ve forgotten why (maybe I was just frustrated), but I began punching him. The punches felt unnaturally light, which is unsurprising since back in the real world, I was probably in sleep paralysis, unable to move a muscle. Finally I won the fight, and to show his submission, he offered to sacrifice three sheep. Dream analysts would have a field day with this one. I tried to reason with him, but he went and fetched the sheep, while I got on the ferry leading away from the island, hoping that getting away from it might take me out of my dream. As I stood on the deck of the ferry, I could see him executing the sheep: with a scythe-like weapon, he made a weird motion which started above the sheep, then suddenly was below its stomach and continued upwards through its body and out at the top, spraying blood. I turned my back to the whole show, and that’s the last thing I remember before I woke up.
I was anxious for half a day after that, and I had a hard time getting to sleep tonight. I don’t know what, exactly, it was I feared, but the fear was real. I don’t believe in supernatural phenomena, but I do believe in the fear of supernatural phenomena, which is every bit as real as the fear of natural, real phenomena. You can’t control that: just knowing something’s not real, or not what it appears to be, is not enough to impress the amygdala. That’s why I wouldn’t attend a sleepover in a haunted house even though I believe every haunting is an unexplained natural phenomenon; that’s also why knowing you’re in a dream doesn’t necessarily translate into infinite bravery and causal control. Being subjected to waves of surreal sensory stimuli that I know are not caused by actual objects and happenings but which feel every bit as real as those that are isn’t my idea of fun.
An experience like that does something to your sense of reality. For a moment you catch yourself wondering whether you’re Zhuangzi or the fucking butterfly. And considering false awakenings. A false awakening is when you dream that you wake up. So, you’ll get out of your bed, which is unmistakably your own bed and not some generic dream-bed, in your own bedroom, unmistakably the room you were in when you fell asleep, except none of it is real, it’s a dream and therefore ruled by dream logic. If the particular dream is a nightmare, you could have monsters climbing out from under your bed, UFOs outside your own window or little dead girls coming out of your very own TV. And while that isn’t a particularly constructive train of thought, it gives rise to an epistemic problem: how do you know this isn’t a very realistic false awakening? How, for that matter, do you know that your dream last night was a dream, and your reading this reality, and not the other way around? Much can be said about such problems, but when discussing them one always ends up going in circles, and not very healthy circles, either.
The sense of living in a dream while awake (as opposed to that same sense when lucid dreaming), I found out while researching this post, is called derealization, and is a symptom of (among other things) panic attacks. Sufferers describe it as extremely unpleasant, not at all like the meditative seeing-the-world-for-what-it-is state that some traditions seek out. I believe them. I wouldn’t wish that feeling on anyone.
