The Unmoored Whimsy of the Sleeping Mind
Dreaming, lucidity, and the delightful abstraction of reason
I had a dream the other day in which I saw my dog who had passed away. But in it, I didn’t realize that anything was amiss. The suspension of the world I’ve known for years was gentle and unassuming. I accepted it without question.
But oddly, while I dreamt, I still had the sense of reason to know the correct date at the time. It was leap day.
I sat on the sofa beside my dog and calculated how many leap days she and I had spent together. Unaware of the nearly four years without her, I quietly reveled in the moment and caressed her graying black fur as I counted up the time.
6 leap days… how is that possible?
I double-checked my math.
6 leap days… times… once every 4 years… and 1 dog year is equivalent to 7 human years. 6 x 4 x 7 = 168!? Boo is 168??
But, even while I knew the day of the year and could engage in middle school mathematics, I lacked the reason to wonder “Could this be a dream?”
It’s incredible that she’s still alive after all these years. We should really spend more time together. Why haven’t I been walking her lately?
I asked questions to the air as I looked into her ancient, loving eyes.
In the past couple of years, I’ve begun having lucid dreams. In some dreams where I’ve encountered my departed dog, I’ve realized then and there that she was a figment of my imagination. I realized that the only way I could see her again was in the midst of a dream.
There’s reason to believe that the main physiological difference between a regular dream and a lucid dream hinges on the activation of specific parts of the brain. When lucid, the parietal lobe and the prefrontal cortex are active. In normal dreams, they turn off. The parietal lobe is the part of the brain responsible for spatial awareness and processing sensory information, and the prefrontal cortex is associated with logic, planning, and decision-making.
According to brain scans, it appears that in lucid dreams people simply have access to more of their brains and personalities. Essentially, to be lucid is to be your near-normal self as you walk through your subconscious creations.
All other dreams are dictated by the unmoored whimsy of the sleeping mind. Even the most vivid and meaningful among them tend to lack that added layer of awareness. But in lucid dreams, we can control environments and, with enough practice, build worlds. We can be conscious participants rather than unwitting observers.
Having access to those higher reasoning skills within a dream is a novel sensation and one of the aspects that makes lucidity so enticing. But, as with any skill, there are gradations to it. You need to be an amateur like me before you can become a full-fledged, on-command lucid dreamer.
Many have lucid dreams without even realizing it. They have conscious awareness some nights but lack the retention to recall the experiences once they wake. Even with a bit of experience, there’s no guarantee that I’ll remember my dreams at all — lucid or otherwise.
When I do dream, it’s the exception rather than the rule that I’ll find fault in the impossible events, objects, people, and places that I encounter. I’m still tricked by the outlandish. But there’s a beauty in figuring out a dream is a dream and there’s a different beauty in being hoodwinked into believing otherwise.
When I go to sleep and see my grandma, she’s as alive and standoffish as ever. But it’s never with the understanding that she died two years ago. I talk to her as though not a moment has gone by.
In some dreams, I’ll have the presence of mind to dance or fly through the strange places in which I find myself. I’ll cherish what it is to see my departed dog again. I’ll understand that we’re inside an aberration that will drift off into the ethers with the rising sun. But most nights, I’m still deceived by my dreams. Time melds together and the fur of a creature I haven’t seen in years will feel as familiar as the very ground beneath my feet.
I’m slowly learning to identify when components in my dream environments are amiss. Sometimes I’ll piece together that the only time things could operate in this hazy way is while I’m asleep. And in those moments, I’ll become lucid and exert control over the narrative unfolding.
But in many more dreams, I’m still fooled by the outlandish. I’m at the mercy of logic that evaporates the moment I awake again. I’m off in a place where reasoning is ruled by abstraction and the world around me is governed by laws that hold no sway once morning comes.
People morph into other people. I transition from place to place with little to no warning. I insert automatic justifications for each new change. I create elaborate false histories on the fly. I convince myself of the absurd stories my sleeping mind has created and transplant myself into them without a second thought.
“Why am I being given this award?” I wonder as I walk the stage of my old high school to a round of applause. And before considering the scenario unlikely, I reflect back on a series of made-up memories. Flurries of images flood me from days that never happened. I see myself spending hours after school wearing a white coat and confined to a science lab meticulously working. In only seconds, I’ve established a detailed context for the improbable situation.
There’s no scenario in dreams too perverse or otherworldly to believe. There’s no context too confounding to twist into something quotidian, even if the contortions demand Olympian feats of flexibility. It’s only in rare cases that I notice the oddities of my sleeping mind for what they are.
In most dreams, I drift across international borders with little to no warning. In one moment, I’m talking to a hostel keeper in Belize, and the next I’m giving my dad an orientation of my elementary school like he’s a soon-to-be-student in a class full of people I met in the Mediterranean.
At one point, I’m trying to subvert a tyrant coming to power by attaching his roller blades to my knees and cartoonishly stalling time. In the next, I’m canoeing down a rushing river with an aging talk show host as we escape prehistoric predators. Sometimes I leave Planet Earth completely. How I get from one place to the next is scarcely ever clear.
In dreams, the pathways between polar events blur in an incomprehensible mist. The ride between Point A and Point ⏁⋔⍜⍀ is circuitous, but we make sense of each bump along the journey with blank-faced immediacy. We blithely welcome each bend, hill, and valley along the precipitous, serpentine street.
It’s bizarre how uncommon it is for us to see the extraordinary for what it is while we’re dreaming. But it’s that total suspension of reason that’s one of the most mesmerizing aspects of these odd places where we spend our sleeping hours. Without logic at play, we live by the unbridled imagination. Ideation is unshackled.
Sometimes, dreams will seem to take place in another language entirely. I’ll wake up wrestling with the loose skeletons of concepts, but lack the words to describe a single bone or ligament.
In those moments when I notice that I’m dreaming and try to bring the abstract back to the waking world with me, I fail to do the experiences proper justice. I feel myself drift between a realm where logic is as impossible to pin as a vagabond, and one where reason lives in established borders. In one, the walls are as unflinching and defined as concrete and in the other, they’re more pliable than fresh dough and more permeable than a sea sponge.
Often, the two worlds don’t jive at all; when they do, the Venn diagram is limited. Nuance is lost in translation. Trying to describe the finer and more mysterious details feels like attempting to envision a never-before-seen color or a time before time.
The rules of my sleeping world evaporate anew each morning and recalling the rulebook is something I can never quite manage. Even in those dreams where I have the sense of reason to identify the day of the year and the current problems of my life, logic fails me in other ways. But it’s the free-floating malleability of dreams that’s part of what makes them so special. It’s the suspension of the laws we know that make the place we each spend our nights so fantastically alluring.
For me, why exactly dreams happen and what precisely they mean are almost irrelevant. The theories have varied widely throughout history, and it’s an issue on which there’s still limited scientific consensus. Whatever the case, dreams remain one of the most fascinating and enigmatic components of the human experience.
It’s a surreal and lawless place we travel to each night. And in a world with less and less mystery, these nightly reprieves where all structure falls by the wayside are a joyously welcome conundrum.
I’ve had dreams that are either frightening or ridiculously improbable from which the action intensifies with no break. At some point I realize it’s just a dream and I stop the action and say in the dream, “This is just a dream. This isn’t really happening!” I think I awaken momentarily but soon go back to sleep. After I’m fully awake I recall the dream and the interruption.