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This site is mostly about my dreaming life. I consistently become aware that I'm dreaming while still asleep, having nearly the full presence of mind I have while awake. I write down some of the conversations and experiments that I perform in this state—and there are literally hundreds of these logs here!
(Note: Since that's a daunting amount of material, I've excerpted some examples below. If you wish, you can instead jump straight to the index of recent posts, or browse by a growing selection of tags. There are also open letters, essays, and other writing stored on this site.)
Yes, really! In scientific parlance, what I do is called lucid dreaming. Enough people have done it "on command" in laboratories that it has been proven to be possible. If you are interested in the peer-reviewed experiments where sleeping people have demonstrated this ability to scientists, you should read up on the very interesting work of Dr. Stephen LaBerge at Stanford University.
Let me be abundantly clear: I don't do drugs, and this is not a joke project for a sci-fi writer. I am a software developer and a devout supporter of critical thinking. My documentation here is for science, and the accounts are here to be studied as data. (Since we can't yet video-record the dreamworld the reports are naturally going to be a bit fuzzy. I've tried to be as accurate as possible while adopting a readable script-like format.)
Given that I just pointed out that lucid dreaming is a 'known' phenomenon, you might ask what the big deal is. Here are the points as I see it:
I am eager to engage any sleep-research lab that wants to study me. I believe that atypical individuals can serve as linchpins in the understanding of our minds and our reality (such as Daniel Tammet). I also hold some hope that search engines and archiving will give us tools that history did not have in understanding if these dreams are actually a form of communication through an as-yet-unknown mechanism.
I am often in scenarios as if I'm being revived from cryonics or being simulated, as in Sour Grapes of the Future...
sulu: (mumbling) "Okay, that explains that comment. I wasn't clear on what that meant before."
He handed me something in a bowl, and began to speak:
sulu: "There is something you need to understand about showing people Future Things. You have to be careful. It's a lot like if you are dealing with someone who has never had a grape before. When you give them their first grape you must be 100% sure it's not a sour one...because if it is sour, then every time they're asked if they want a grape after that they will say no."
Whenever I can, I try my best to see if there is knowledge to be brought back which could be useful to science, like in The Facet Logic of Linear Time. I try to establish how I got to a place and who the people think I am, and then if they tell me something that I don't understand I just keep asking...
me: (jokingly) "Hi. I'm some data, I need to be managed."
manager: (amused) "If you are data, then where is your method?"
me: "My method is perhaps lost in my madness."
Because I got the impression that he was smart, I decided to abandon my quest to go elsewhere and just talk to him.
me: "Have you heard of schizophrenia? Or lucid dreaming? Do you know what it means when I say 'I am asleep somewhere'? From my point of view, I entered your world moments ago and will wake up shortly in my own reality."
manager: "You are confused because you try to model that these things are happening in a simple sequence. You have a constructed idea of linear time, and it isn't *actually* working like that."
me: "Can you explain to me how time *actually* works then? It would be great if I could take some testable information back. Some kind of scientific breakthrough would be very helpful if I were to make it on the basis of talking to you."
manager: "That will be difficult to express in your... what you call... 'Facet Logic'."
me: (confused) "Facet logic?"
manager: "Umm... I need to translate..."
His accent got heavier, and he paused.
manager: "The 'physics'?"
Indeed, the science of the dream world can be frustrating to have explained, such as when I was trying to figure out how audio was being produced in My Claymation Audiopad Lesson...
man: (waving his hands) "No, no. There's no limits like that."
me: (skeptically) "Then I don't see how this can possibly be working. Whether carried in a sound wave or not, all information needs to be transmitted though a substrate."
man: "No it doesn't. It's not analog, it's not digital, you can't really think of it that way."
me: (frustrated) "There's got to be some way you can explain this to me. I've heard this not-analog-not-digital argument before, but it's just makes no sense. Where is the darn stuff STORED?!?"
He paused to choose his answer carefully.
man: "In our expanding minds."
Generally I have a lot of Matrix-type experiences suggesting Earth is a technology-based or "game". But at some points, I also run into a lot of more typically 'religious' or 'spiritual' answers to some of my questions, as in Extended Visit to the Ether...
girl: "She's probably taking a bath right now."
me: "Ok. So how are you connected with this person?"
girl: "We're married. Every spirit is married with a body."
me: "So you're married to a body...but, you've got some kind of body here too. Who's YOUR spirit?"
girl: "There is another spirit above me, and a spirit above them..."
me: "Ok great. So what the heck am I? I mean, do I have a spirit, or am I the spirit? Because I don't remember this place too well...am I passed out on the floor 99% of the time? And why is it I seem to be the only one of us who can relay information back and forth? Is my spirit anything special or powerful or do I have badass friends?"
Suddenly a copy of a Dave Gahan album titled Overconfident appeared on the bed. No such album exists AFAIK.
couple: "He's your brother."
me: "You mean, spirit brother?"
couple: "Yes."
Sometimes when I ask questions, issues of the legality of contact are brought up. One of my most memorable examples of that was when I was talking to some people who looked like the sketch comedy group Kids in the Hall...
I looked Dave straight in the eye.
me: (exaggeratedly) "I'm. Asleep. Y'know."
Dave Foley's face was now very strange, with black eyes and a hat, and deformed a bit like Freddy Krueger, though less scary. My staring proceeded.
dave: (equally exaggerated) "Yes. We. Know. In. Fact. We. Are. Not. Supposed. To. Talk. To. You."
me: "Why not?"
dave: "Firstly, because of the fact that you all are drugged and basically unaware of the forces of evil—it's considered a bad idea. Secondly, there are certain biases which exist in the community."
He lowered his voice and whispered.
dave: "...and there actually are some lawsuits going on right now."
Impersonation and the idea of using celebrity identities come up often. So just as there is a LiveJounal for Jesus, I take any appearance of a famous person with a definite grain of salt. Here someone was impersonating the author of Harry Potter in Psychokinetic Potential of 1 in 15...
pretty girl: (beaming) "Hi there!"
I smiled back but tried to keep pace with the guide. He stopped at a closet and gathered some items, it said "J.K. Rowling" on the door.
me: "Wait, that name...that's the author who wrote the Harry Potter series?"
guide: "That's correct."
me: "I've not read any of the books but they are popular where I am from. The author is depicted as an English woman. Why are you taking things out of her closet? Do you feel this identity is yours, hers, stolen, shared?"
guide: (shrugging) "You should re-evaluate the question of if there's any such thing as truth or not. I'd argue that truth is more about knowing what makes a 'good' lie, and what makes a 'bad' one."
If I were to take a solipsistic perspective, I could say that these entities with which I am speaking are all generated by my brain with no minds of their own. I do not feel that way—at least, not any more than everyone I meet while I am awake is a figment of my imagination! :P
My feeling on this matter differs from the one expressed by laboratory-validated lucid dreamer Alan Worsley. After a lifetime of working with lucid dreams he concluded "I believe that the virtual characters in dreams have no minds of their own." Though I deferred to the experience of trained researchers like him around the time of my first lucid dream over ten years ago, I have concluded that it is simply not useful to model everything that goes on in my dreams as being less real than the waking world.
Despite that philosophical issue, I acknowledge that our mind is indeed able to build complex projections onto inanimate objects. Tom Hanks projected a personality onto Wilson the Volleyball in Cast Away, and I don't think that's too far off from what can happen...it's certainly more likely in dreams. But if we aren't going to be solipsistic about everything, we have to measure for signs of "otherness". I've decided it's there in my dreams, but you'll just have to draw your own conclusions from the body of data I've written down.
Here are a few dreams I like to start people out with:
Though my focus has been trying to bring back some kind of alien gift or solution to an unsolved problem, it hasn't happened just yet. So on various occasions I've tried some internet outreach to this world. Interest has been surprisingly limited—but I think a large part of that comes to what a comedian I saw said: "Nothing's more boring than to hear about someone else's dream...unless you're in it." :) However, I hope you enjoy the journal and please don't hesitate to contact me about the material.
(Note: If you found this site because you are new to lucid dreaming, PLEASE read my warnings about "New-Age" and "Alternative" literature. Although experiences like mine (and perhaps yours) challenge existing dogma about dreams, the solution is not to abandon critical thinking!)
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