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I also noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas continue, but they become less and less logically interco
So you get every illusion of logical co
After four weeks of sleeping all the time, I wrote my theme, and explained the observations I had made. At the end of the theme I pointed out that all of these observations were made while I was watching myself fall asleep, and I don’t really know what it’s like to fall asleep when I’m not watching myself. I concluded the theme with a little verse I made up, which pointed out this problem of introspection:
We hand in our themes, and the next time our class meets, the professor reads one of them: “Mum bum wugga mum bum …” I can’t tell what the guy wrote.
He reads another theme: “Mugga wugga mum bum wugga wugga…” I don’t know what that guy wrote either, but at the end of it, he goes:
“Aha!” I say. “That’s my theme!” I honestly didn’t recognize it until the end.
After I had written the theme I continued to be curious, and I kept practicing this watching myself as I went to sleep. One night, while I was having a dream, I realized I was observing myself in the dream. I had gotten all the way down into the sleep itself!
In the first part of the dream I’m on top of a train and we’re approaching a tu
I also noticed that I could see colors. Some people had said that you dream in black and white, but no, I was dreaming in color.
By this time I was inside one of the train cars, and I can feel the train lurching about. I say to myself, “So you can get kinesthetic feelings in a dream.” I walk with some difficulty down to the end of the car, and I see a big window, like a store window. Behind it there are—not ma
I continue walking into the next car, hanging onto the straps overhead as I go, when I say to myself, “Hey! It would be interesting to get excited—sexually—so I think I’ll go back into the other car.” I discovered that I could turn around, and walk back through the train—I could control the direction of my dream. I get back to the car with the special window, and I see three old guys playing violins—but they turned back into girls! So I could modify the direction of my dream, but not perfectly.
Well, I began to get excited, intellectually as well as sexually, saying things like, “Wow! It’s working!” and I woke up.
I made some other observations while dreaming. Apart from always asking myself, “Am I really dreaming in color?” I wondered, “How accurately do you see something?”
The next time I had a dream, there was a girl lying in tall grass, and she had red hair. I tried to see if I could see each hair. You know how there’s a little area of color just where the sun is reflecting—the diffraction effect, I could see that! I could see each hair as sharp as you want: perfect vision!
Another time I had a dream in which a thumbtack was stuck in a doorframe. I see the tack, run my fingers down the doorframe, and I feel the tack. So the “seeing department” and the “feeling department” of the brain seem to be co
Another time I’m dreaming and I hear “knock-knock; knock-knock.” Something was happening in the dream that made this knocking fit, but not perfectly—it seemed sort of foreign. I thought: “Absolutely guaranteed that this knocking is coming from outside my dream, and I’ve invented this part of the dream to fit with it. I’ve got to wake up and find out what the hell it is.”
The knocking is still going, I wake up, and … Dead silence. There was nothing. So it wasn’t co
Other people have told me that they have incorporated external noises into their dreams, but when I had this experience, carefully “watching from below,” and sure the noise was coming from outside the dream, it wasn’t.
During the time of making observations in my dreams, the process of waking up was a rather fearful one. As you’re begi
You might like to know how this process of observing my dreams stopped (which it has for the most part; it’s happened just a few times since). I’m dreaming one night as usual, making observations, and I see on the wall in front of me a pe
When I woke up later, there was no brass rod, nor was the back of my head soft. Somehow I had become tired of making these observations, and my brain had invented some false reasons as to why I shouldn’t do it any more.
As a result of these observations I began to get a little theory. One of the reasons that I liked to look at dreams was that I was curious as to how you can see an image, of a person, for example, when your eyes are closed, and nothing’s coming in. You say it might be random, irregular nerve discharges, but you can’t get the nerves to discharge in exactly the same delicate patterns when you are sleeping as when you are awake, looking at something. Well then, how could I “see” in color, and in better detail, when I was asleep?
I decided there must be an “interpretation department.” When you are actually looking at something—a man, a lamp, or a wall—you don’t just see blotches of color. Something tells you what it is; it has to be interpreted. When you’re dreaming, this interpretation department is still operating, but it’s all slopped up. It’s telling you that you’re seeing a human hair in the greatest detail, when it isn’t true. It’s interpreting the random junk entering the brain as a clear image.