Lucid Dreams: Consciousness

I am awake, I am conscious. I am asleep, I am unconscious.

But that it were so simple. Consciousness is analogue, not digital. Consciousness is a threshold.

Awake, your threshold to consciously process external stimulus is lower, asleep it is higher. But there is always some consciousness for everyone when they sleep. If this is not true, we should form a class-action to sue all alarm-clock manufacturing companies for false advertising.

So what happens when a lucid dream dawns? First the threshold of consiousness lowers. Psychologically you become more aware of both your internal and external state. Physiologically you remain in the same sleep state (well... not quite, we'll look at that another time).

So there is consciousness; that is you, now, sitting there reading your computer screen. A 'normal' dream happens to you, you are the 'I' character within it, and you remember it on waking as a dream. In a lucid dream, you have the same mental faculties as you do now.

But that is not the same as the threshold of control. In the pre-lucid state, you believe you are awake. You rise from bed, go about your morning ablutions, eat breakfast, catch the train to work, then suddenly realise... this is a dream! And find yourself back in bed. This is a 'false awakening', and it can repeat, over and over again, the Groundhog Day torment.

When the full lucid state occurs, the consciousness comes with a threshold of control. You are asleep. You know It. You are dreaming. You know it. Will you have total control over the dreamscape? Sometimes, yes. But it depends (I believe) on what your subconscious is trying to tell you.

I don't like the term 'subconscious', it connotes 'lesser'. I think the non-conscious part of mind (the complement to the conscious part) is both larger and more powerful than the conscious part. Non-conscious is the 'thought', the now, directed by the 'thinker' the part that will determine what we will do next. The conscious is the 'observer', which can program the thinker, and to which the nonconscious will subordinate itself; but how often do we invoke this observer, which will manage the direction of the proactive thinker to produce the reactive thought?

Security Blanket

I somehow managed to 'forget' to buy cigarettes yesterday. I stopped off on the way to work to pay some bills and pick up a couple of things and thought "I'll do the other things first and buy smokes last", then on the way out I thought "I won't need a ciggie at work, so I'll stop off at the servo on the way home and get some". I needed a loaf of bread on the way home and started thinking "Do I really want to pay $4 for bread at the servo?" and I had no cash on me so I came to the conclusion I didn't want to use a card to buy bread and a packet of cigarettes. By the time I'd finished thinking all that, I found I'd walked right past the servo anyway.

(Disambiguation: I work night-shift so I usually sleep during the day. I talk about "last night at work", but to both save and add to the confusion when I talk about dreaming I refer to sleeping 'last night' although it was actually daytime. It's the night to me... my clock is shifted 12 hours to accomodate the 6pm start time for work).

It was interesting to notice the effect of not having the 'security blanket' of cigarettes in my possession, whether I intended to smoke them or not. Right from the time I arrived at work I thought about smoking more, and had the impulse to reach for a cigarette more often. I didn't want the nicotine of course, I pined for the taste of smoke. I didn't chew more gum, my daily use of it is slowly declining quite naturally and of it's own accord, but this morning waking up with no cigarettes in the house I find I've been through four or five pieces already.

The last couple of nights I've been dreaming more again (although not lucidly). I've been trying to fall asleep lying on my back without success, there always seems to be some little itch to scratch which requires me to break the relaxation of a limb, so after half an hour or so I roll over and my mind goes to sleep quite quickly. This morning however I woke up lying on my back, so the suggestive power of thinking and blogging about sleep seems to have had the effect of my sleeping brain choosing this position during the night.

I wonder if I'll decide to buy cigarettes today? I've been tampering with my habit for about 3 weeks now, but I'm trying to avoid marking the time. I'd rather use 'health and wellbeing' as a measure of success than chronology as this is an easier game to win - a single cigarette resets the clock and denotes a loss, when the game must be abandoned and started all over again.

MMMmmm! Minty Beer!

Oh right, yes this is a blog about nicotine addiction and we got side-tracked, and will again ;)

My brain is loving the nicotine hit I get from the gum, I didn't have a cigarette the whole time I was at work. There was one with the coffee this morning, and I'm having a couple of relaxing ales now I'm back home. When I want my beer to taste like mint, I'll quite happily shoot myself, OK?

But it is promising. A couple of times tonight I was chewing away and wanted to reach for a ciggie. There's a sort of subconscious impulse to put hand to mouth and take a drag, and when it happened I chomped a new piece of gum... Oh yeah baby! You know the way I like it!

There's just one left in this packet now, so it probably won't quite make the week. I considered telling myself "Don't buy a pack tomorrow. If you can hold out till Wednesday you've won!", but this sets up a game I'm destined to lose, so I'll ignore that little voice. The "make one pack last two weeks" game can wait for another day. I'm almost 3 weeks into this exercise, and 'the impulse' is suprisingly rare.

Observation: habits are not broken; they dissolve.

Lucid Dreams: Triggers

Here are some things that are likely to induce me into a lucid dream state.

Sleeping on my back (the 'supine' position). This is just about guaranteed to start a lucid dream, but I find it very difficult to fall asleep in this position. My physical body will quickly relax, my legs especially will become heavy, 'paralysed', but my mind will stay wide awake and after twenty minutes or so I will get restless and need to roll onto my side. Although there is a dissociation from my body, I can almost instantly reconnect and move it.

Being too hot. If my body gets too hot during sleep, this external stimulus will often transfer to the dreamscape (ie. dreams of being in the desert) and induce consciousness.

Suffocation. This can be really annoying. The bed sheets cover my face so my mind wakes up to deal with it but my body doesn't. I move the sheets from my head, or turn over, try to inhale only to find it's only the psychological model of my body that's moved and the physical body is still in the same position. Exhaling, I can feel the sheets lift off my face, only to have them sucked back again when I next inhale. Sometimes it can be difficult to wake from a lucid dream, and even when you think you have it can be a 'false awakening' which I'll discuss elsewhere.

My lucid dreams will naturally occur in cycles over a few weeks, although I've never bothered to measure the period between peak intensities or kept a 'dream-diary' which perhaps I should consider doing. I have read that keeping a diary increases the frequency and recall of lucid dreams (they 'fade' from memory in the same way normal dreams do), and a priori it seems reasonable to assume this would be the case; when I think about lucid dreams during waking hours they are more likely to occur.

Sometimes I know during the day I will be lucid hours before I go to sleep. As the peak of the cycle approaches I get an odd subtle sensation. Maybe I'll be at work, and I'll feel like I'm 'wearing my pyjamas'. It's a very low level of the 'good vibrations', too quiet to intrude, the 'hollowness' of the yawn is constantly there. I retain full and normal control of my faculties, but some part of my mind is - only very slightly - 'away with the fairies'. I am not epileptic, but from descriptions I've read it could be similar to an extremely mild petite mal fit which can last for hours.

The healthier I am the more likely a lucid dream is to occur, such as eating well for a while ('well' as in quality rather than quantity) - not always so easy with my lack of culinary skills! Alcohol and other 'certain substances' can initially induce more lucid dreams, but continued use will tend to supress them, and indeed prolonged use can supress nearly all dreaming. I say nearly all, because they can't be stopped altogether. During periods of my life when I've been relatively unhealthy or under high stress lucid dreams have a darker ambience and are more difficult to control although there is full consciousness.

Note to self: need to talk about the aspects of a lucid dream - consciousness, control, light content, when other 'presences' are likely to autogenically appear, when they can be summoned, being trapped in a room or scene, being able to completely change the scene, ... that sort of stuff - and the differences between a 'normal' dream and a 'lucid' one - I seem to contradict myself a bit when I try to do that, so I need to find a way of stating it a little more clearly. It is believed (by some men in white lab coats) that most people have a lucid dream at some point in their life, and certainly that everyone experiences the pre-lucid stage though not with great frequency - maybe once or twice in a lifetime. If you ever have a lucid dream, you will know it and recognise the difference from a normal dream.

Lucid Dreams: Good Vibrations

What I'm about to describe may or may not be directly related to lucid dreaming. Often the two are co-incident, but either can also occur without the other. It may simply be an unrelated phisiological phenomena that triggers consciousness when I'm asleep or in the hypnogogic stage.

So... have a big yawn. Go on, do it now. Notice the buzzing, hollow, reverberating sensation in your ears.

Imagine there's a little feather tickling you deep in your inner ear.

Now stick your tounge on the terminals of a 9-volt battery, and add that to the sensation in your ears.

We're approximately getting there. It's not forced like the yawn, it's a self powered vibration that starts out gently, always in my right ear. I took the opportunity to ask an audiologist about it once, he suggested it might be something to do with air being trapped in the eustachian tube. Maybe but...

Turn up the power. It comes in waves, becomes too much vibration for one ear, and spreads through my whole head. It can become so powerful that eventually my entire body is being vibrated until it (or at least the psychological model of it...) is catapulted from the bed and into a lucid dream.

It's an extremely pleasant experience, although sometimes the timing is out and I get jolts and shudders as the waves of vibration overlap. When I was young it was at first scarey and I fought it, but the sensation became stronger until I could not. Now I have some control over the vibrations, I can will them to become stronger and I can, sometimes, subdue them.

This is one part of the pre-lucid state, and other things associated with sleep paralysis can occur here; 'The Hag', the 'presence' in the room, if the vibrations are not so powerful, the presence might grab my ankles and drag me off the bed. I stopped fighting that too, once I knew it was a dream. If you let him drag you right off the bed, you end up... back in bed! Sometimes he tries again, sometimes he gives up.

Somewhere I'll talk about the physiological body, it's physical tactile nerves, and the psychological model your mind creates of these nerve positions and the information they send. I want to find some video clips of 'alien abductees' talking about the way they are restrained. And about the 'drilling in the ear'.

Lucid Dreams: Prologue

This is a subject I've always wanted to write about, but I've never been able to decide what I want to write. So a blog is the ideal place to do it.

I'm going to spam out some thoughts as they occur, then maybe later I'll do a 'link post' so they can be followed through in some more coherent order.

Before I begin, I'll just note one thing about my lucid dreaming that appears to be slightly atypical. Many studies I've seen indicate that most people who experience lucid dreams do so in the early morning, after a restful nights' sleep either just before waking or having woken briefly and returned to sleep. My lucid dreams invariably occur within the first two hours of sleep, sometimes directly from the waking state. Sometimes they continue through most of the night, sometimes I return to normal sleep, and sometimes I'm so refreshed from the lucid dream I remain awake all night only to be tired again five or six hours later.

Try Different Brands

This is probably just a good bit of blind luck for me. The first box of gum I bought was "QuitX" brand. Same amount of nicotine as the better known brand, but a bit cheaper - I'm buying nicotine not gum. Yesterday the local pharmacy only had "Nicorette", so I got a box of that to make sure I had plenty of supplies to take to work.

Now don't get me wrong, if I were a chewing gum afficianado Nicorette is probably better quality gum. It's firmer, and the flavour lasts longer. But I'm really not into chewing gum, I just want my drug hit. I find the softer, slightly larger pieces of QuitX more satisfying. I can play with it better on my tounge and with my teeth. It seems to gratify the 'oral fixation' part of the smoking habit in a way Nicorette doesn't.

I expect other people find different brands better for other reasons, just like brand loyalty with their cigarettes, but if I had happened to try the 'big name' brand first, I don't think this experiment would have lasted the first day. I've tried nicotine lozenges in the past too, sucking mints just didn't do it for me.

So, if you're going to change your smoking habit, my suggestion is by a box of each brand. The texture that suits you is more important than the flavour.

I've been smoking 1 cigarette each day at work, and I enjoy it guilt-free. I'm still a smoker. I now have a packet with 3 cigarettes in it. If just 1 comes home with me tomorrow, it will have lasted a full week.

The next game is to see if I can make a pack last 2 weeks...