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Dream Diary Introduction | |
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Home « Hobbies « Lucid Dreaming « Part-1 | |
This introduction was written in 1994
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This first part of the log commenced during a long period of vivid dreaming in October 1994. After years of vaguely planning to create some kind of Dream Log, I was finally motivated to do so by work colleague Trish Gannon.
The work you are holding now represents the fulfilment of a ‘waking dream’. It is an intermittent diary of my dreams. Many published works can claim to analyse dreams, or to be inspired by dreams (some works of Carlos Castaneda and Philip K. Dick for example), but this may be the first work whose body is composed entirely from real dreams. The book is not intended to ‘show off’ my ability to dream, it’s designed to highlight the quiet miracle of dreaming, and to encourage you to try and remember and enjoy, and possibly control your own dreams.
The idea for the project was seeded back in the middle of 1988 after I saw a television documentary from Holland that revealed the results of scientific investigations into the nature of dreaming, with particular emphasis on ‘lucid dreaming’. This is a state where you become ‘awake in your dreams’, and you can often take control of the normally chaotic chain of events in dreams, and direct them for your own dreaming enjoyment. This documentary had an unexpected and dramatic effect upon my dreams, within a few days I began to have some partly lucid dreams, and over a period of many months they developed into fully lucid dreams. Over the next few years, the whole nature of my dreams changed for the better. With very infrequent exceptions, my dreams became filled with a recreational atmosphere of frolic and relaxation. So often I have woken up and lay there stunned by the music, colours, scenes and plots I have just experienced inside my dreams, only to find 30 minutes later that the memories have faded into disjoint fragments. I wanted to keep my dreams alive, and so this project was born.
The nature of this Dream Diary exempts me from almost all of the deadlines and peer group review that would be attracted by a normal literary project. There is no need for creating a coherent and intriguing plot, there is no need for carefully calculated character development, nor is there a need to strictly obey the rules of grammar (although when the rules are broken, they must be broken in a consistent way). Most importantly, there is a relatively inexhaustible supply of new material available that requires almost no effort to produce, all I have to do is go to bed and dream. You may criticise the fonts, the headings, or the page layout, but how can you construct a serious criticism of a collection of random dreams? The great Polish author Stanisław Lem must have been similarly delighted when he published A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitude, both being anthologies made up entirely of reviews of nonexistent books. In A Perfect Vacuum, Lem warns us:
"The writing of a novel is a form of the loss of creative liberty … In turn, the reviewing of books is a servitude less noble. Of the writer one can at least say that he has enslaved himself — by the theme selected".
Shortly afterwards, Lem points out that the new and original theme he has chosen has liberated him from enslavement:
"We shall go further: we shall depict fictitious books. Here is a chance to regain creative liberty, and at the same time to wed two opposing spirits — that of the belletrist and that of the critic".
Lem may have been delighted at his creative liberation, but I am simply beaming with smug satisfaction at the almost total liberation the envelops me.