To Sleep Within A Dream

I am dreaming. I am aware of this fact. Not in the way where sages say “we’re all dreaming”, but in the real sense, I am lucid yet unconscious. Awake in a layer below waking life.

From the Vedas to simulation theory, we have long questioned the frames of existence. The starry night is recognized with eyes closed as well as on a screen. And yet in this reverie I have created a subdivision of reality. My body shifts and is yet corporeal. I walk through the labyrinthine halls of every home I’ve ever had. A fractal of my memories.

Here questions abound. Who makes the laws for this place? What Draconian tyrant came up with the dream logic of nightmares?

What am I to this dream? Subject or creator?

I am on an island. It resembles the painting by Bocklin. I can feel the biting wind which is so unusual for dreaming. Cyprus trees of black spear into a clouded sky as rocks of ivory white project as walls to a rocky passageway.

I’ve always considered sleep to be a kind of miniature death. I am hardly alone in this sentiment. Perhaps this is why my dream took this form.

As I take my first step I trip on a stone and fall forward. I go to catch myself but when I do there is only fog which I am flying through. I am suddenly in a forest glade, surrounded by black trees. I see yellow eyes in the bushes. I am shivering despite feeling numb. Aloof to my present danger. As though some atavistic fear response has hijacked only one part of my present mind. My body remembers that neanderthal hunted by wolves in my long dead ancestry. Yet my frontal lobe knows this is not real.

From what mind do those eyes see? Like a hydra of one body they gaze at me and yet am I not the one looking at myself? What medium runs through me and allows for this paradox to take shape? Is there truly some Hypnos who governs the subreality of dreams, that sub basement of subliminal symbols.

I watch as my surroundings blur into a paint-like brown hue. As though my brain were doused in water and every thought reconstituted into vaguery. Such resets of consciousness, we hardly even notice them in dreams. These transitions between scenes. As though overwhelmed by one emotion the soul retreats to another region of its imagination.

The brown dissolves into the back of a car. I am being driven somewhere I’d rather not be. The driver, an amalgam of every cab driver’s face I’ve retained, swerves in and out of traffic as he seeks to bring me somewhere I dread. I believe it’s the hospital. That symbol of birth and death.

Why whisk me off to here oh demiurge of the night? Is it that the black forest and the antiseptic halls both lead to that darker night? Perhaps the metaphor of a taxi, not an ambulance strangely enough, is preferable to being eaten by wolves.

And once the emotional tracts are in place it’s easier to move somewhere parallel than in the opposite direction. I merely speculate, as with everything here. I try to rationalize.

I should note that I am a product of my time.

Dreams to me are freudian, or some post-freudian school I’ve unconsciously absorbed through television. Gone are the days when god, or gods, delivered messages through visions. Now this strange telepathy occurs between us and that pre-language part of us that still shares our breath. It’s wonderful, an atheistic miracle. And yet we discount these underclocked processes as though they were the chaff of days.

Perhaps premonitions are thoughts which occur because they confirm predictions we’ve made without imagination or language. Those murky mentalities, the reptilian kind, which allows us to breathe while sleeping.

Back to the dream at hand. I look down at my hands and count a number of fingers which shouldn’t exist. A number with a decimal. This is due to my brain’s processing speed being slower than my attention span's rate of drift. My hands are also green and growing saplings at the tips of my irrational fingers. This seems perfectly normal to me. As though the energy circle of life should recycle me while I’m still animate. It seems my subconscious is aware I’m lucid. The more aware I am of my awareness the more abstract the symbolism becomes. As though it were writing up to a higher expectation, where immersion was no longer required for me to process the surrealist content. Again I may be reaching as I speculate. Sorry to intrude on your immersion.

I reach out with my many limbed arms and claw at the sky. Like a branch brushing against window glass in a windstorm. I reach without agency. I notice I’m clumsier than I normally am.

I want out of the car, but I know it’s beyond my powers. The meat wagon goes on and Charon does not make stops.

Making the mistake of looking in the rearview mirror I see myself. I look awful. Dressed as though going to a funeral. Grey skinned and clammy. Corpselike. This seems heavy handed. My dreams writhe and I’m yanked numbly to a different scene.

Aren’t lucid dreams autonomous, can’t I choose what I dream? I wake up and know it’s time for school. Not this cliche. I close my closed eyes and try to make myself somewhere happy. I open them and to my surprise I’m in a tropical paradise. One of those beaches used to advertise resorts and beer. Another cliche, but a more welcome one. I begin to question the fidelity of my imagination. When I notice that the sun is also green. I fall asleep on the coarse sand.

If I were to sleep in my dream and dream, could I dream forever? A nested simulation of the mind going ever downward like a tunnel of mirrors. Until the content of the dreaming was nothing more than mentally removed form. The pureness of the mind separated from that of the senses. Could someone train to do this?

You might try to daydream next time you sleep. But beware the kind of immortality you could find in that loop. Zeno never woke from his reverie of Achilles and the tortoise.

I’ve often thought there is a tripartite world between mind, math, and matter. It’s a model from Penrose which I find useful. Is this a journey into the purity of mind? Where symbols become abstract like paintings until we exist in a splotchy world of emotional colours. There’s something platonic to that idea.

I wake to find myself in what I instantly know to be an arctic base. One of those research facilities where scientists test the rules at the outermost extremities of the world. There is a blizzard outside and it causes me to feel cozier within the warmth. I go to sleep again. How long have I been dreaming? I only remember when I became lucid, nothing before.

I wonder if theory of mind comes into play in these recursive simulations. Just as one might dream of a friend and see them behave more or less realistically. What if we simulate our own minds when we dream within a dream. And the symbolism became therefore more a cardboard cutout, an archetype. Is this the substrate of consciousness? Is it to be found in sleep science and lucid dreaming?

I awake again, but this time I’m in a library sleeping at a desk. I reach for a book, but am unable to read. They are meaningless symbols shifting like a slot machine. I reach into the book and pull out the staff of Gandalf. With it I burn down the library. From what fickleness the mind plays. The illegible is burnt as though it were a threat. I snap the staff in half, realizing what I’ve done. Somehow I know this was the alexandrian library. I feel guilty, but without the negative feeling. As though it were a sentencing I agreed with, but in a deterministic sense.

From the flames I see a large chicken egg. Is it a phoenix? I see it cracking open. I go to peer inside and see galaxies of stars within. A hatching of a universe in the surrealities of the mind’s eye. Where did this egg come from? Is this missing demiurge of a chicken the offspring of another egg? I climb inside the egg and find myself floating in space. I fly to different stars and upon closer inspection realize they’re pearls bubbling leading upwards. Their opalescent sheen bears the reflection of infinite mirrors. I head towards the surface.

I pierce the surface tension of the water as though it were a membrane I was passing through. I enter the supraliminal space and float upwards as Christ would have. It would appear my mind seeks transcendence, is this a defense mechanism? a dissociation from overwhelming imagery. The numinous is a kind of stunning, an overloading of the rational mind.

I look down and see MobyDick breaching from the cosmic waters. A notable amount of named characters are entering into my dream. Is this an attempt at identity-making as I grasp for associated ideals? This subconscious intertextuality, a wizard’s implement, a messiah, an idol of revenge. Jung would have a field day with this hodgepodge.

As I float upwards I pass out. I wake into utter blackness, is this death?

I awake again, but this time in my bed. Is this a dream? That other cliche where I keep waking to a nightmare?

I pinch myself as though I were in a cartoon. I feel the expected pain, I am no longer dreaming.

I get out of bed as though I were the start of a bad novel.

Time to face the mundane after that miracle of the imagination.

You could call it the dullest dream.

Will I ever wake to a level above waking life?

Will I even realize it when I do?

A dream within a dream?

I see now, all heuristics are hidden cliches.

Have all philosophies been dreamt of?

Am I still dreaming, are you still dreaming?

You are reading and that is a kind of dreaming.

I’ve lost my point.

But it seems to me not to matter.

There is always another layer.

Another page.

Life is either a self-referencing moral satire,

Or a straightforward act of gibberish.

This doesn’t confuse me and I prefer neither.

I’m lucid in that sense. Observed and observer.

And as to whether I’m dreaming,

That can’t even be known after death.

Neither heaven nor hell,

nor any enlightenment can disturb me from

this waking dream.