Foreward: Funeral Imagination
I hear her voice say, “come over and sleep with me after work.” There are a lot of people in my driveway; some are pissing with their shirts off. The cops line us up and start talking. I lower my head to my hands in shame, until I feel my fingers on my eyes—now I see my hands. I must be dreaming. I got out of line and the cop thought I was going to start shit with him, so I kicked him in the head and all he could remember was silence as I disabled his mentality and perforated his hearing. I scream at him as loud as I can without destroying the neighbors. I am enjoying this primal moment so much that it starts to fade, so I quickly remember to spin around and regain my steady state.
I’m in a very clean bathroom being filmed by Tim because today he is sick. “Get into the stall and look up, out a window!” So I use the prison fence on the hilltop. “We should go there sometime,” He says “no but I’ll go to the forest.” The choir interjects, “don’t take Old Trenton road—It’s not polite, go to the beach because it is dangerous.”
I am on 535 driving—no, walking to Stewarts in Spotzwiddle and see Fisherman and Serlin. As I walk I remember to tap, tap, tap, my waist in order to maintain dream consciousness. I feel like a bit of enlightenment, so I turn to them and ask them, “Why are you my dream characters?” No response. These people aren’t very good dream characters, but I know who is. Quick, find a corner! I walk through a dirt path near a pond under some low trees and come to a cemetery. “Is she dead?” I thought aloud, “Can’t be-- check your cell, what time is it?” I can’t read text godamnit! The funeral is going on but I walk away. I don’t want to be here.
As I leave the gates, a limousine pulls up; Gina, Olivia, in the front. They open the black door and Angel comes out in a fur coat. We’re celebrity shallow to see each other. I have to ask her, “Angel, why are you--” she cuts me off, “shh we don’t have much time, you’ll understand later.” She takes me by the hand and runs up the mountain, but it’s too steep to lie down on, so we lie vertically.
The Earth disappears and I am no longer concerned with falling off the hill. We roll around in space for a while with our bodies in fluid motion. We look back at where the cemetery would be but all we see is the separate beauty we have created in our imaginations. |
Bedtime: A Guide To Lucid Dreaming & OBEs
This is a typical example of a lucid dream, with all the common traits that may seem abstract and confusing to anyone unfamiliar with the so-called Dreamworld. Lucid dreams-- you don't just have one, and it's not something you just do. It is a practice; almost a form of meditation. There is only one step towards gaining a lucid experience: question your reality. If you ask, "Am I Dreaming?" constantly, every day, I guarantee you will have a lucid dream within a week. I started off by looking at my hands and asking myself if I was dreaming about 30 times a day. Once you build up this habit in your everyday life, you are able project these habits into your dream consciousness. If you find your hands in your dream, you will gain full awareness of your surroundings and be able to start living your dreams. In one week after I began practice, I was able to form completely controllable dreams that have changed my perception of life.
There are many intricacies in the world of lucid dreaming, like Dream Language. Ever notice that you can’t read text in dreams? Have you ever tried to hit a light switch in a dream? Do you ever accidentally see your hands in your dream? I cannot stress enough the important of finding your hands in your dreams. Asking yourself 30 times a day “Am I Dreaming?” will do very little compared to asking yourself while waving your hands in front of your eyes. This is more effective because when you see your hands in your dream for the first time, it will ground you in dreamland. Your consciousness will be levitated into a new heightened awareness, and you will be vulnerable to an entire new perception of life.
Maintaining your awareness in dreams is a key issue that forces many dreamers to give up on achieving a lucid state. Dreams are full of distractions. If you stop looking at your hands in your dream you will begin to forget that you are dreaming and accept what you see as reality. If you continue to look at your hands you may become too aware and begin to wake up. There are two techniques to maintaining lucidity: Dream Spinning and Wake Walking.
There are many emotions associated with grounding your body for the first time: Intrigue, vulnerability, awareness, euphoria—and these emotions will often cause the dream to fade and for you to wake up. Dream spinning is the most commonly know method of rejuvenating a dream. If you start begin “waking up,” immediately put your hands over your eyes and start spinning your body in circles. This technique is guaranteed to awaken you in a new dream. The common flaw with this technique is that it actually feels like a new awakening. Often, you will dream spin into your seemingly normal, everyday life, sometimes even in bed. But every time you spin your body in your dream, it affects the fluid behind your eyes and your cerebral cortex in your brains. These parts of your body feel very lifelike, which is often why dream spinning leads to false awakenings. After you complete a dream spin, you will more than likely think you are awake—but you are not. It happens every time, and after you’ve tried it a few times, you will stop falling for the false awakenings, and force yourself to believe you’re in a dream. This can be terrifying for some people, as the details of the environment will appear so authentic, that you will be scared to make believe it is all still a dream.
Wake Walking is used during immediately after the realization that you are dreaming, as opposed to when the dream is fading. The first emotion that comes to my head when I gain lucidity is anxiety. I am overwhelmed by infinite possibilities of my dream, that I want to do it all before I wake up. If you keep you hands by your waist and constantly tap your hips, or your knees, or your stomach, you will be able to hold your grounds in your dreams. You don’t want to keep waving your hands in your face during your dreams—it will ruin the sensation of all the incredible images you can experience. The trick is to keep touching yourself.
Once you get good at dreaming, you’ll want to explore the endless possibilities of you imagination. The best way to change the environment in a dream is by turning a corner. Yes, corners are unusual in dreams. When we turn corners in our everyday life we subconsciously wonder what is around the bend. If you want to meet someone special or be immersed in an exotic location, turning a corner while thinking of that person or place will trigger an episode to unfold.
The thing to remember is that dreams can last two minutes and feel likes years. Often I feel that I need to get everything accomplished before I wake up—this is one of the common cases of waking up, wanting to do so much at once that your environment just disappears. By going with the flow, wake walking, and dream spinning, two minutes of your life can be extended into years, literally.
The easiest time to have a lucid dream is in the morning. One tip is setting your alarm an hour before you have to wake up. When the alarm wakes you, get up, brush your teeth, prepare for the day, but go back to bed for 45 minutes or so. Your drowsy state in morning, as well as your clear mentality of dreams, will entice a lucid experience. Whatever you do, don’t start mentally planning out your day as you try to go back to bed, think about what dreams you we’re having, and sometimes you can even jump back into them.
If lucid dreams are wild, then out-of-body experience are borderline insane. In fact, every time I tell people that I have left my body four times, they don’t seem to take me seriously. OBEs can be describe as lucid dreams, where instead you realize your dreaming, you immediately go from lying down, awake, to an immediately dream consciousness. This is a very strong sensation, and takes months of lucid dreaming prior. It’s a very strong, sometimes painful, feeling. Have you ever felt sleep paralysis? That is when you’re lying in bed, half asleep and you can not move or speak. This has happened to almost everyone. This is the state in which you are in right before you leave your body. OBEs often occur when you are trying not to fall asleep. This could also be a technique to gain a lucid dream. When your body wants to rest but you are trying to stay awake and aware of your surroundings, the two worlds get mixed up. Once reach the breaking point of sleep paralysis, you will feel yourself leave your body and fly up into the air. OBEs are often cited with being on rooftops or in the sky. I remember my last OBE, I was in my friend Kristen’s basement, and I could completely experience the kitchen directly above, and hear the conversation going on from right next to her parents.
The sounds you will hear when leaving your body are very high-pitched and violent. Many sleepers resist saying “yes” to sleep paralysis, because it feels uncomfortable and terrifying. It can be described only as dying, which has led me to understand the afterlife a little better now that I have had four OBEs—but I don’t want to get into a religious debate. I’ve talked to members of the church about lucid dreaming, and radicals tell me that inducing spirituality is the way to hell. On the contrary, people who hold strong religious values are more likely to experience the highest plateau of lucid dreams, finding God. Your dreams and OBEs are an extension of yourself—your goals, your values, and your inner thoughts. If you have a strong relationship with God and your religion, lucid dreaming could bring you one step closer to enlightenment and strengthen your faith rather than question it.
The final prose, literally, is writing down your dreams. When you wake up and begin writing what you remember, more and more details will come to you. Physically writing with your hands is the best, as you actually get in the habit of seeing your hands from this. I keep a dream journal on my nightstand and write as often as I can. Sometimes I’ll go back and type them up; they make for great English assignments. When I look around my waking life, I find that everyone is searching from enlightenment, in some shape or form—could be through religion, science, drugs, technology, astrology, celebrities—but I wonder if they have ever tried looking in the one place they never thought they’d find it—their dreams.
|
Trolley
It’s not actually a car, but everyone in this area calls it one. It’s actually hybrid of a bicycle and shopping cart. The wheels are small, like of a shopping cart. There are four of them too. The seat is located off to the right side of the trolley directly above the set of right wheels. There is a steering wheel too, which is why they call it a car. There is a also a small bell on the left side by the front wheel that sounds if you cut too close to any oncoming traffic. The entire structure is frail and skinny, made only out of a few thin steel bars.
We make our way up a dirt path. It is a warm summer afternoon, good for hiking and hunting. We get off our car and make our way up a hill; there is an oil rig off to the side; so close you could touch it.
I want to get off the hill, but it’s hard to climb down while carrying all this stuff: equipment, papers, forms, and my camcorder. The girl I’m with sees to make it down alright. There is a park ranger in a nearby river. It seems pretty shallow since he is standing upright. He is there to pick up people’s belongings that fall into the water. When I got to the bottom of the hill, some of my paperwork floated away and landed on the surface of the water. I have to spit.
The wind blows the cloud of spit onto the park ranger as I watch it happen in slow motion. I apologize profusely. I figure I would save him the trouble of getting my paperwork from the other side of the river. When I start reaching in, I have the desire to swim. My camcorder is floating away now, I completely forgot. I see the battery light on the camcorder die as the current picks up and I lifted downstream violently and maliciously. At the end of the river is a cliff. I could see the bay turn into a waterfall. I figure that the impact of the fall would be more painful than drowning, so I retire into the rapidly embracing river. I never drowned before, and I never wanted to, but after I took that first breath underwater, I felt my body turn unconscious. It wasn’t as long or as painful as I expected. |
Test
My colleagues and I were given the assignment to infiltrate a labyrinth, forming teams as necessary to complete certain objectives. The maze of buildings is complete with offices, hallways, corridors etc. We are given mental and physical tasks along the way. Evan told us we we’re actually in a large community college. We came across a water fountain that was abnormally high up from the ground. The task was to drink out of it water. I crossed an indoor forest with my friend Chad along the way, but outside the door near the water I saw Jen Fritz leaving with her father, they seemed to have been just visiting. There were these people, like NPCs, that we would see when we walking into an important room that we would follow, in order to stay going in the right direction. There was one old, slightly fat man we followed.
I wondered away from my teammates and took an alternate way up the double-helix stairway. The room started rotating, fast. I was about to fly off. I found myself hanging from an awning in the giant rainbow rotating room. All of the sudden, lights were spotted on me and the professor start asking the class above me very unbreakable, philosophical questions. This was a required mental task being performed sometime after 2020.
“what I am about to say will effect you for the rest of your life.”
“who was the first to invent science?”
“who told you it was okay to come here?”
A student speaks up,” I am agnostic and burn question marks on people’s lawn”
“that’s a very good religion”
Another student asks “how come society is progressing but the average human still wants to get married at 23?”
These questions frustrated me and made the climbing experience unbearable to manage. I got off the awning as soon as the turning slowed. I saw Lindsey and she said she couldn’t dance anymore because of the phetnol patch. One of the guides of the game said that the stunt I pulled want funny so I called him Mork. He got mad. We wondered into one of the forest chambers and he told us we would soon be faced with a real test of endurance, and that the only way to survive was to be your own leader. Someone from the another team; a girl, comes over crying and starts hugging and kissing people, she eventually makes her way to another one of the girls and says “I have a disease.”
The virus causes your face and skin to fall off and then you die. Soon, everyone gives it to each because they all panic and don’t want to die alone. We hear an explosion. The labyrinth dilapidates and there are fires everywhere. Everyone is trying to make it out for themselves but realize teamwork was needed anyway. The individuals entrusted only the teams they initially explored the buildings with. I found out that Zach was initially on my team along with some girl and Chad. The fires progressed, people’s melted in front of us. We eventually made our way back to the burning basement room—it was the earliest room we could recall, before the water fountain. We constructed a bridge across an underground pit and were able to break down a brick wall. We found our way to a meandering corridor maze that we initially started in. It wasn’t badly damages, so we were practically out. We smoked our cigarettes. We were alive. |
