Lucid With Whoopie

I haven't been having much success with my lucid dreaming attempts, so I decided to start following Dr. LaBerge's suggestions in his latest book, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, more closely. I did an extended version of his „Prospective Memory Training” exercise, with good results, and I have also been keeping a fairly detailed dream log for the last several weeks. The log is meant to help me remember my dreams (which I don't seem to have any problem doing) and also so I can generate a catalog of „dreamsigns”, as LaBerge suggests, to be used later for the „Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams”, or MILD for short. I'm hoping that by following LaBerge's research proven techniques I will eventually be able to have lucid dreams at will, which he says is perfectly possible.

So far I have had only one fully lucid dream since I've renewed my efforts to have them a couple months ago. But, I haven't completed the dream log yet (LaBerge suggests one full month at least), or the consequent catalog of dreamsigns. In other words, I had this lucid dream without really even trying yet, though I'm not sure what caused me to become lucid in the dream either. I just suddenly became aware that I was dreaming for no apparent reason.

I was having an ordinary dream where I was in a hotel, and unable to find my room. I asked the front desk clerk if she could look up my room for me and also give me a new card-key, but she told me she couldn't help me unless I had some identification, which I did not. So I walked away from the desk and entered a nearby stairwell. I climbed the stairs, for some reason struggling on my hands and knees, and at some points having to pull myself up the steps by grabbing ahold of the railings. I managed to climb about two or three flights before I couldn't go any further (though there seemed to be more flights above me). Then I saw a door that appeared to lead out to the roof, and I stood up without any problem and walked out the door. As soon as I stepped through the door I became fully lucid, but I don't know why or how. I just suddenly realized I was in a dream and that everything I was seeing wasn't real.

I was outside on the roof of the hotel and could see other buildings for miles into the distance. Everything was incredibly clear and real seeming (which is a well known characteristics of lucid dreams). I stood just outside the door I had just come through at the top of a kind of handicap ramp that lead down from the door along the wall to my right with a handrail on the outside. The camp extended only eight or ten feet as it dropped about two feet to the roof itself. I looked down at my feet and scuffled them on some loose gravel that was strewn over the tar paper roofing material that covered the ramp. I was totally amazed at how real and detailed everything seemed.

I started to walk down the ramp and noticed a broken window in the door (which was opened against the wall to my right). The window was dark and offered a good reflection, so I stepped close so I could see my face. Yep, it was my face. As far as I could tell it looked just like my face when I look in a real mirror. But before I could get a really good look something behind me caught my attention. I turned around and saw Whoopie Goldberg walking on the roof of the next building over about a hundred feet away from me. It was clear that she saw me and was coming in my direction. So I walked over toward the edge of the roof to greet her.

As she was walking I saw two identical Whoopies split off from each side of her, so now there were three of her walking, each with the same characteristic nonchalance that she does so well. When they were all close enough, the Whoopie in the center spoke to me, clearly and loud enough so I could hear her over the gap between roofs. She said something like, „Joe! Imagine YOU being in here! How did you get in?”

I wanted to ask her, „In where?” but I knew from other lucid dream experiences that I wouldn't get an answer to a question like that, so I just shrugged. But then I remembered that I wanted to recite Edgar Allen Poe's famous poem, „A Dream Within A Dream”, while I was in a lucid dream, and now was my chance to do it. I also vanely thought that I might actually impress Whoopie with my ability to recite Poe. But I had a good reason for reciting the poem too.

LaBerge recommends setting goals to accomplish specific tasks in your lucid dreams, such as flying or meeting some famous or dead person (or both). According to LaBerge, these goals will not only make lucid dreams more likely to occure (by providing motivation for the dream), but tasks will also give the dreams direction and purpose (i. e. make them more interesting and exciting). Flying was too easy for me. I've done that many times in pasz lucid dreams, ans while it's certainly always thrilling to do so, I had other interests in mind. I wanted to do something that would establish the level of my intellectual „presence of mind” during the dream. So I decided to recite a poem as one of my task goals in order to test the extent of my lucidity. I chose Poe's „Dream Within A Dream” for the irony, but also because it takes some effort for me to recall the lines to this poem, which is to say that I can't just spout them out without „intellectual effort” to remember the poem. But I certainly knew the poem well enough that I should be able to recite it in my dream at will, that is, assuming I have my normal waking intellectual facilities; and hence the nexus.

But, in this dream, as soon as I turned my attention to the task of remembering Poe's poem the dream itself began to fade out, and it was obviously a direct consequence of my effort to remember the poem! I realized instantly that I could remember the poem if I really wanted to, but it would cost me the dream in order to do so. In other words, remembering the poem would either cause me to wake up or at least loose lucidity somehow.

Naturally I wanted to stay in the dream so I could explore. So I abandoned my effort to remember the poem and returned my full attention to the dream at hand. But the dream had desolved into a white featureless fog in which I was now adrift. I relaxed and began to concentrate without effort on the dream (a technique that I practice during meditation just for this reason) and soon the dream returned with the same clarity and detail as before, except now I was in an alley behind the hotel instead of on the roof, and Whoopie was nowhere in sight.

But there were plenty of other people walking around, even other famous actors who I recognized but could not name. There were props and stagehands moving busily about, and I could even see scenes from movies I didn't recognize being acted out around me (and presumably being filmed, though I never saw any cameras or film crews).

I started walking to explore my dream (I was still very much lucid), and entered a busy breezeway that boarded what seemed to be a staged city park. There I saw a group of adults and two young girls, all dressed in old-fashioned costumes, the little girls in frilly victorian pink and yellow dresses. It seemed to me that the adults were buying a balloon from a vendor to give to the girls. But when I stepped closer I saw that the „balloon” was really a small parasol that lifted both girls into the air together as they clung to it desperately.

The girls were clearly distressed, and I considered dashing to their aid, but distinctly thought, „No, this is only a dream, so they wont get hurt.” I didn't think they were in any real danger even though they were both screaming for their lives. (I also remember not wanting to ruin the dream by stiring up my perversion, sexual contact with children, which might happen if I came into physical contact with the girls, which of course I would have to in order to rescue them.) The other adults around did not seem concerned either. So I turned my attention back to the breezeway and suddenly woke up. Or so I thought.

Actually, I „woke up” into another dream, just as clear and real seeming as reality itself, or perhaps a lucid dream, though I was obviously no longer lucid, but I thought I was wide awake.

I „woke up” in an institutional dayroom, and thought nothing strange about it. I was sitting at a table that was empty, and a female psychologist had just sat down adjacent to me. She asked me to explain my thoughts and feelings regarding a piece of art that I had posted on the Internet. I didn't know what art she was referring to, so she told her (male) assistant, who was sitting on my other side, to pull it up on his laptop, which he had just placed and opened on the table so I could see the screen.

I didn't like the feeling of being interrogated, and I had to urinate. So I told her I needed to use the bathroom before we could continue. She and her assistant exchanged some kind of knowing look that I noticed, but ignored. I really didn't care what they thought.

I got up and walked over to a public mens room that was actually just fifteen or twenty feet away (the whole set up was similar to a prison visiting room, though I didn't think of it as such in the dream). I entered the bathroom and walked over to a small green facility on the wall that I thought must be the urinal, though it did not look right at all. As I stood there trying to figure out what was wrong with this bathroom I heard a couple of people talking to each other as they exited the bathroom behind me. One of them was clearly a woman.

I thought for a moment that maybe I had entered the women's bathroom by mistake. But then to my relief I saw the full size mens white urinals over a little ways on the wall. So I walked over to one of them and began fumbling with my pants.

Just as I extracted my penis to urinate a hand suddenly reached over and grabbed it. I now saw that the psychologist's male assistant had followed me into the bathroom and it was he who was molesting me. I pulled away from him by way of rebuffing his lewed advance, at which point he said something like, „Don't pretend you don't like it.”

At this point I woke up for really real, in my cell here in Federal prison, and, of course, I had to pee.

I don't know what this dream means, if it means anything at all. But it has raised some questions in my mind about the nature of dreams in general. Why, for example, did Whoopie call me „Joe”? I always think of myself as „Jet” or sometimes „Duncan”. But I consider „Joe” to be my father's name, not mine at all. (Though it was also the name of a very close friend I had in Fargo, and also the name of one of the attorneys working on my Federal appeal whom I talk to often and consider also to be a good friend.) I never think of myself as „Joe”, and so when someone calls me by that name it lets me know that they don't know me at all, personally. So, if Whoopie was a construct of my personal unconscious mind (as many suppose), then why wouldn't she use my personal name?

Also, what did she mean by, „in here?” This is one of those questions that I have often and futilely tried to solicit an answer for in past lucid dreams, by asking everyone I could in the dream itself. Questions like, „Where is this place?” or „Are you real?” or „Where do you come from?” But the answers I got were almost always either vague or meaningless. I've since come to a kind of impasse, and suspect that maybe the questions themselves are meaningless in the dream context. But still, why would she make such an allusion?

Perhaps I will have a chance to find all these things out. But for now, the mysteries remain, and the dreams go on.

Note: (September 25, 2012) Since having the above dream (several weeks ago) I have realized a couple of things.

First, I had forgotten all about my "alterego" Joe that used to help protect me when I was a kid in prison all those years ago. It could well have been this alterego that Whoopie was addressing in this dream when she called me "Joe". That would imply a lot.

Second, I previously had assumed that when I tried to remember the "Dream Within A Dream" poem in order to recite it, that the reason the dream faded was because I was overtaxing my brain by expecting it to remember something little difficult to remember and maintain the dream at the same time. But that doesn't really make any sense. If my brain can't sustain a perception of the world while I'm taxing it, then it wouldn't be able to sustain its perception of reality either when I did so.

So, another more interesting and much better explanation has come to me. What if it wasn't my brain that couldn't keep up with the demands, but the connection to my brain that couldn't keep up? In other words, suppose that the dream was actually a kind of "out of body" experience in which I was only "tethered" to my physical body (and brain) through a restricted communication channel? Of course I'm thinking of the "silver cord" that mystics commonly refer to when speaking of their own out of body experiences. Though I have never seen such a cord, in my dreams or otherwise, it could explain why my dream faded when I tried to remember Poe's poem. I figure that maybe by trying to access my physical brain so heavily I was in effect "pulling" on that cord and hense causing my "mind" to "return to my body" and hense "wake up".

It's just a thought for now, but one I will certainly be exploring in future dreams.

P.S. I think it is best to think of the "silver cord" as a symbolic metaphor rather than a form of reality the way some mystics pretend. The important aspect of this metaphor is the connection that is sustained between mind and body in a dream. So the fact that I have personally never "seen" this connection is not significant to its possible presence.