Living Out Our Dreams

THAT WILL BE ME.

A couple of days ago, I read about lucid dreaming on my brother’s blog and thought to myself, “Hey, I should really try that out sometime.” I re-blogged it in the post right before this one. If you haven’t read it yet, you probably should before reading on! :)

It seemed like a really interesting concept - how our brain works harder when we are asleep than at any given time we are awake. I also watched in the Discovery Channel (haha what a nerd) that several great discoveries like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Bohr’s Atomic Structure, and Dali’s surreal paintings were all influenced by dreams. Having said this, who wouldn’t want to tap into one’s own mind to unlock such potential? At least that’s what I thought, until…

Just this morning, I came home exhausted from a sleepover with Oli and Henka. As we were up playing Starcraft 2 all night long, I failed to garner enough sleeping hours. And so when I got home, I instantly crashed on my bed, hoping to doze off for at least 3 hours since I had to meet up with my girlfriend in the afternoon.

I somehow awoke in the middle of my nap, unaware of how long I’ve been out. Before moving any muscle, I regained consciousness and the first thing I did was to start thinking to myself. “Hmm, I haven’t moved at all and I’ve already regained consciousness from my nap. Maybe I can pull off the lucid dream thing..”

You know that feeling when you wake up in the middle of the night, but can’t be bothered to get up, and so you decide to fall back to sleep? That’s exactly the next thing I did.. except I made sure that my brain retained consciousness while my body loosened up once more.

Two seconds later, it really felt like my body shut down. I couldn’t move at all either because of some surreal force pushing me down or because the gravity in my room quintupled, whichever one you prefer. Wiggling my toes didn’t work. Moving my fingertips didn’t work. I even tried to open my eyes to see if I’d hallucinate, since apparently that’s what’s supposed to happen. However, it seemed that I lost control of my eyelids too. And then it got scary…

A deep woman’s voice started talking to me. She went on and on like a broken record saying, “You’re a bit skimpy. You’re a bit skimpy, kid.. You’re a bit skimpy. You’re a bit skimpy, kid..” (or was it skinny? I couldn’t make out what that word was) At first she was just speaking normally, but as a couple of seconds passed, her voice only grew louder and her temper, worse, to the point where she was already shouting in anger. The voice felt so loud and frustrated inside my head that all I wanted at that point was just to wake up.

Then I remembered reading somewhere that in order to give my body a little kick-start, I had to repeatedly think to myself, “You can control your own body.” While doing so, I pushed out the constraining force with everything I had for 5 difficult seconds. Eventually I managed to kick the force off my chest as I jumped out of bed.

The first thing I did was to look for my maid; I just wanted to see any other person whom I could at least say hello to. And that’s just exactly what I did.

All I’m thankful for right now is that I couldn’t open my eyelids when I tried to.. Otherwise who knows what I might have seen.