Michael Eriksson
A Swede in Germany
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Dreams and awareness

In the weeks after an addendum to an older text on an odd dream ([1]), I have had an unusual number of new odd dreams (two of which are discussed briefly further down). A point of interest has been when I am and am not aware that I am dreaming. In the past, I have often had a sequence of growing awareness of the fact that I was dreaming as the dream progressed—especially, if the dream involved a very, very bad situation. This with the effect that the very, very bad situation was defused by my growing awareness.


Side-note:

A problem with “observing” dreams is that memories seem contingent on waking during the dream. (Although, I have had some experiences of remembering, or seeming to remember, the one dream or dream scenario while having another dream.) Correspondingly, this progression has always been one that moved towards waking, which raises questions about issues like causality. For instance, did I wake up because I understood that the dream was a dream or did I understand because I was waking up?


My most recent (remembered) dream shows an odd inversion of this pattern:

I was stuck in some end-of-computers scenario (maybe, end-of-civilization; my memory fails me), there were no more computers, no more Internet, all my writings were just gone, etc. As I and a small group of others were climbing out of a volcano (dreams!), it suddenly appeared that at least some computers were still intact, piece after piece of happy news followed, and by the time that we rested after exiting the volcano, it became clear that the whole thing had been a false alarm. After this very, very bad situation had already been defused, I (in unknown order) realized that it was a dream and woke up.

A few days earlier, I had a dream where I just woke up in the middle of the very, very bad situation (not something unique for me, but rare):

I had entered a building and was walking along a narrow corridor. I went through a door and, suddenly, somehow, found myself about to walk into something ravine-like, crossing the building from one end to the other. I barely caught my step in time, but now found that I could not just step back, because behind me was a wall, I was standing on a very small ledge, and my only way back to the corridor was through stepping over a piece of empty air between ledge and door in a very dangerous, misstep-slightly-and-plunge-to-my-death, manner. Worse, I was so sleepy (within the dream) that I could barely hold my eyes open—while closing my eyes would make me fall asleep (still within the dream) and then down. At this point, I just woke up.


Side-note:

An interesting side issue is that the sleepiness-within-the-dream reflected a very similar sleepiness in real life. In fact, I was at the beginning, not the end, of my intended sleep when I woke up, in a scenario of having over-stretched the day, fallen asleep in a daze, and waking up much, much too early. (How early, I cannot estimate, but it was long before I had enough sleep to kill the sleepiness.)


In both cases, there were plenty of signs that would normally have helped me see through the dream. (As a comparison, I once deduced that I was dreaming from the fact that a cellphone was larger than it was in real life, even while everything else seemed within what was realistic.) Why, I cannot say with certainty, but chances are that the reversal of the very, very bad situation in the first dream made me complacent, while I simply woke up too early from the second (the interval from landing on the ledge to waking up seemed quite short.


Side-note:

In [1], I also (probably) woke up without realizing that I had been dreaming. This is in so far unremarkable that there was no very, very bad situation at hand, while it seems that it is the presence of very, very bad situations that move me to think about what is going on and make me realize that a dream is taking place (compatible with my remarks on the first dream). On the contrary, that dream put me in a (in many regards) better place than in real life, including being first twenty, then ten, years younger and having a correspondingly longer remaining life expectancy. Likewise, if I find myself in bed with Jessica Alba, why should I take the risk of waking too early?

The development of that dream could conceivably be taken to imply that my mind was trying bring me “back to the future” of 2009, but this would be overly speculative.