Grappling With the Self and Losing: A Lucid Dream and How I Interpret it

I have been reading a series of post about lucid dreaming, written by @paradigmprospect (they are totally worth checking out if you haven't seen them already, by the way), and they got me started thinking about my own experiences with the phenomenon. Now, most others who cover this topic approach this unusual "altered" state willingly and there are ways to induce it but I have never sought out lucid dreams. For me, they seem to happen as a result of episodes of sleep paralysis. I awaken unable to move or speak and while I used to try to fight it but it, is often useless to do so. The best option, I find, is to try to fall back into a deeper stage of sleep. Interestingly, when I am able to slip back into a dream after one of my episodes, I retain the awareness that I had felt during the sleep paralysis. In a sense, I am thrown, often against my wishes, into a lucid dream. Sometimes, I can take advantage of the opportunities that this offers me. I can explore my mind from the inside, manifest objects and events, and be or do anything that I want and when it is like this, the experience is quite pleasurable. However, this is not the norm. Typically, there is always something there to try to stop me from actualizing my desires in the dream. It is as though there is some adversarial force opposing me throughout the event. The joyful journey becomes an odyssey that is filled with challenges and nightmarish situations. From what I understand, the mechanism behind lucid dreaming is not well studied and that fact, combined with strange sensations and vivid realism of the experience, leads some people to attach supernatural significance to the act of lucid dreaming. I can't say that I buy into that but I can certainly understand why people feel that this is the case. However, I have a different take on the issue. I believe that being aware of one's dream is treated, by the mind, as an abnormal state of consciousness and it tries to correct it. To put it more simply, the unconscious mind notices that the dreamer is aware and it sends its "minions" to chase their awareness away.

I described a particular dream in the comment section of @paradigmprospect's post but I will provide a more fleshed out description of it here because I think it illustrates the "self-struggle" fairly well. As is typical, I became partially awake and found myself "conscious" in a state of sleep paralysis and tried to fall back asleep. I easily began dreaming while maintaining my awareness.

I found myself traveling along a road in the desert at great speed. It was a road that I recognized from my own area and, being that I have actually driven on this road many times before, I was able to generate a pretty "accurate" representation of it in my mind. The colors were vibrant. The tan of the sand and the dark greens and browns of mesquite bushes all stood out in vivid detail. However and not surprisingly, a desert landscape that one sees off the side of a highway is not particularly exciting so it was the speed and manner of my motion that was the focus here. It was a lucid dream so I could "move" as fast as I wanted and I did. I seemed to float, in an upright position, a foot or two off the ground and I was progressing at the speed one might drive on a road such as this.

I know that I meant to go somewhere specific but, as is often the case with dreams, that knowledge was lost upon waking. I do know that the place I ended up coming to was not my intended destination. This was the first sign that the unconscious mind was trying to regain control. It had, somehow, disregarded my conscious commands and instead of wherever I was meaning to visit, I found myself at an industrial building with a loading dock. Unlike the road, this place was not familiar to me and does not, to my knowledge, lie at the end of the real road. At any rate, this was an ominous location. It was, seemingly, deserted except for crates crowding the dock. The concrete or stone that the building was composed of was dark and "felt" cold to look upon. In fact, the vibrancy had all but faded, leaving only dingy grays and sickly, yellow, decaying paint covering various pillars and safety demarcations on the ground (as one might see in a warehouse or factory). There were doors but I knew that I did not want to enter the building for fear of what may hide in its darkened interior.

At this point, I was still mostly in control of the situation. I have a tendency to default to fight in many "fight or flight" situations (this is not necessarily a positive character trait but it is one that, for me, would be dishonest to deny) and I quickly manifested a wooden stocked rifle in my hands, which made me feel a bit more secure at the moment. However, that sense of security was a sign that I was losing control of myself. If I had been the "god" of my inner universe (as I had been on the road), I would have had no need for weapons because I could simply think anything into or out of existence. This knowledge, though, was lost upon my arrival at the darkened dock. I still had my agency to create but I no longer understood the extent of my power in the dream world.

That conscious creative agency, I believe, is a trespass from the perspective of the unconscious mind and, again, my unconscious self rebelled, after I exercised my power in order to produce my weapon. This time, the place did not change but it gained a new and malevolent inhabitant. I suddenly, sensed that I was being pursued by something that meant to do me harm. Had it come from inside the building that I dared not enter? Did it lure me there or had it been following me from the beginning? I did not know but I began to feel an urgency to act. I needed to either "kill" or flee from this thing, if I wished to survive. Here, my control began to go off the rails. I did not remember that I was dreaming anymore but, interestingly (as you will see later) I did not lose my ability to think things into existence.

After some time, I found myself cornered by the entity. It took the form of a swarthy man in a tattered black suit (I will call him the tattered man). His skin was dark but there was no indication of race in his features. The tattered man, had no shoes and his feet were bare. Unnaturally tall would be the best way to describe him (in reality, I am 6 feet tall and I was looking up at him but one really can't take measurements of things in dreams) and this was accentuated by his thin build. He spoke with a deep voice but I cannot remember his words or if they even made sense to me.

I was still holding the gun and I wasn't going to just stand around and be threatened by some monster (which at the time I believed to be real) so I took aim and fired but there was no noise or concussion and the rifle broke into pieces in my hands, as the tattered man laughed at my feeble attempt to defend myself. I interpret this in two ways. Most obviously, since there was no actual gun to make all the racket my mind was expecting to hear, it seemed, in the dream, that my weapon was nonfunctional. Alternatively, this could be another obstacle that my unconscious mind placed before me. Either way, I was left holding a handful of useless parts.

I was desperate. The the unconscious had won. I didn't know that I was dreaming anymore. I didn't remember that I could "summon" things to aid me. The tattered man had me cornered and I wished that I had some person to deliver me from this nightmare scenario.

Despite being forgotten, my creative agency remained because someone did actually appear out of nothing and began to advise me. "Use a spear" this person said and the spear appeared in my hand as the rifle had. I thrust into the chest of the tattered man but there was no effect. He, once again, laughed and said "not the heart" or "that's not my heart" (my memory is fuzzy here). I jabbed several more times to various places on his body and, finally, upon striking his throat, he screamed, vomited his life out of the wound in the form of bright light. Finally, he ceased to exist (he simply disappeared, in fact) along with my "adviser."

Whatever remained of the dream, after the confrontation, is forever lost to me but I suspect that I recall the interesting bits. Since the lucid dream was no longer lucid, I imagine that it continued on as most regular dreams do. When I did finally wake up that morning, the things that I described above were burned into my memory and, for the most part, they have faded very little since the experience took place.

The way I see things, all of the events of that dream (and other lucid dreams that I have had) seem to fit with the way that I think this phenomenon works (in my experience, anyway). Everything that I did not consciously produce seemed to serve to stop me from controlling the dream. More importantly, it worked. It was a process of being pushed in directions that I did not "choose" to go. Whenever I took some action, the unconscious countered that action and each time this happened, a little more of my awareness was washed away. In a sense, I see this dream as an abstract representation of the struggle between the conscious and unconscious. Simply put, I grappled with the self and I lost. However, I could be completely wrong. Maybe the people who believe that some outside force acts upon us are correct. I have to admit, it would much cooler to think that I did literal battle with some demonic/ interdenominational/ astral projecting/ whatever kind of being and slew it with my ethereal spear.

Peace

All the images in this post are sourced from the free image website unsplash.com