Threatening Encounters in Lucid Dreams

 One very strong association that I have with frightening lucid dreaming is a story written by Franz Kafka called the Metamorphosis. Gregor Samsa awakes after having strange dreams and finds himself transformed into a big, repulsive bug-like being. It takes a while for Gregor and for the reader to recognise that he’s not having a lucid dream, that odd as it seems, he will not suddenly wake up and be human again. I have had lucid dreams like this, caught in some Kafkaesque environment, bizarre humans with bizarre rules, and I try to find a way to get back home, or elsewhere. I wonder how much control we can have in lucid dreams, because not everything is controllable. I know I am dreaming, and I have the capability to detach myself and take the view of an observer to evaluate the situation, then go back into the ’dream-me’, what I decided to do does not create the story I would have anticipated. Can we practice the way we interfere with our dreams? Can we initiate lucid dreaming? I have the habit of setting my alarm early and press the snooze function multiple times before I get up. In between I often have lucid dreams. Whenever the alarm rings I wake up, leave the dream and dive back in into the same dream-scene. Such dreams are a major source of inspiration for me. I just love that surreal feeling they leave on me, with just enough control to keep my head up, but not enough to unravel the mystery of the ending.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Video Games and spatial memory improvement

More often we read about the negative aspects of gaming. It’s refreshing to hear something positive. I received a Gameboy when I was 10. I have great memories of the games I played, either by myself or against someone. I have a daughter who is 7 and a son who is 2. I often wonder if I should allow them to play computer games. We are one of the few families that doesn’t have a tablet for the kids to play on. My kids get one hour of TV every day and I think it’s too much. I was a web-designer, studied film, I love animation, movies, I binge watch series and I used to play hours of hours of computer games with my friends. I was a Tekken master, you could not beat me. But my kids get nothing of all that. I feel that it’s much more important for them to go outside, to imagine, to come up with their own games, to read, to be bored, yes to be bored out of their skins, to dream about their day. We love playing lots of games: card games, board games, silly games… When they are old...
Read more

My Fragmented Bisociation Thought Experiment on Belonging, Being and Becoming

I want to see the future. We are living through a global pandemic. Anthropogenic climate change is threatening once-known conceptions of living and working, and technological leaps divide generations. Our world is once again volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambivalent. How can we as people advance and thrive despite this given tentativeness? Psychological maturation unfolds when new information is actively absorbed. Growth is a continuous, playful elaboration on contemporary and complex knowledge. One key feature that defines being human is complexity. It is in complexity and contrast that humans stand out as personalities or as communal beings. Intriguingly, the same complexity may break an individual or a social movement – as some opposites become incomprehensible. Often so, perplexity re-enforces examinations of meaning-making that encompass misery and distress, hence inflicting either adaptation or peculiarity. Creative processes unfold along this path, innovations happen, and his...
Read more