“Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream-world and the real world?”
Morpheus really knows how to talk, don’t he? First the hint about the following the white rabbit and then the crack about Alice tumbling down the rabbit-hole. But the allusion to dreams is particularly appropriate given the context and worthy of examination because well, it can be done. And following a punctilious rabbit down a hole into a world that was probably modeled on the lyrics of a System of a Down or an RHCP song is sadly out of the question.
While we’ve known for ages that sleeping people are blissfully [well, sometimes] lost in what can be justifiably called Wonderland, it is astonishing and demoralizing at the same time that the biggest brains on the planet still know very little about dreams. Cutting-edge neurological research has been unable to find answers to stunningly basic questions. Do dreams have a purpose? How are they created? Why do we remember some dreams in the morning and forget others, only to “unintentionally stumble” across them while we were thinking about or remembering something else? Even Wikipedia does not know the answer to these questions, I have checked personally. But while I was there, a title called “Lucid Dreams” caught my eye. And I, so to speak, threw myself into the rabbit-hole and started reading about it.
A lucid dream is particularly fascinating because while it starts out as a regular dream, at some point of time, the dreamer actually realizes that he/she is dreaming but he/she continues to dream, sometimes changing the course of the dream’s “plot” to suit his/her own liking. I, for one, once dreamed that I was tied up and thrown into the way of an approaching express train. I was horribly scared at the prospect of being reduced to protons and neutrons under the hurtling train’s wheels and was desperate to find a way out. And unbelievably, I remember myself thinking aloud. “This is obviously a dream. All I have to do to get away from the train is to wake up”. And I did wake up and probably sat up on the bed for a second and then immediately went back to sleep. Interesting, isn’t it? But there’s something unusual. Even after I consciously realized that I was dreaming, I wanted to wake up and “get rid of that train” whereas rationally, I should have realized that the train wasn’t real. Why was that?
Did you ever have similar experiences? If you haven’t had any, take my word for it. It is an experience like no other. Imagine that one moment, you’re sitting in the company cab/shuttle and nodding off. You start dreaming that you go to a restaurant to have dinner with your friends. You ask for the menu and the waiter says “You’re late. The exam started 50 mins ago. Take this and start writing”. You look up and you’re in a classroom and everyone’s keeping their head down and writing and you, unfortunately, seem to have forgotten to prepare for the exam. Shaking with fear, you look down at the question paper and it’s strange. It simply doesn’t make sense. You can make out some words and individual letters on the paper but inexplicably, it’s all nonsense. Now terrified beyond wits, you look around again and everyone else seems to be fine. But when you look back at the paper you realize that the stuff on it has changed! It’s still nonsense but you can make out the difference.
At this point, you would have realized that you were dreaming if you had watched an episode of “Batman – The Animated Series” where Batman says it is impossible to read anything while dreaming because the two activities seem to be occurring in different areas of the brain. [I only laugh at fools who think cartoons are childish.]
Batman, of course, is right. Anything you might read in your dream won’t make sense; it’ll all be a garbled mess. And there’s something else too, much much more fascinating. Wikipedia claims that light switches don’t work in dreams. By that, I think they mean that when you flip a switch in your dream, the light probably won’t work or maybe the switch itself won’t work. This is so f^ckin cool in a weird sort of way; I wonder who figured this one out!!
So back in the exam hall, you realize you’re dreaming. From that point on, Wikipedia claims, you can control what happens. You can, for example, suddenly find yourself getting cozy with Josie Maran by a warm fire and watch the Pacific Ocean repeatedly kiss the sands of Tahiti in the silvery moonlight. And you can almost feel the touch of someone sitting close to you and turn around expecting to see Josie’s angelic face smiling at you, the pleasant breeze playing with her hair and her body giving off palpable amounts of heat like the fire itself.
Just don’t think of reading her a romantic poem or turning the light off. You will regret it.
To be continued…
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