A fascinating book on states of consciousness

This is a great book describing twelve states of consciousness, including advice on how to enter some of the more exotic ones. Personally, I think Stephen LaBerge (the leading researcher on lucid dreams) is a bit of a flake, but from what I can tell his science is sound. Paul Ekman also has a mention, though his research is rather peripheral to the topics in this book. I have been a huge fan of Ekman generally for years. I follow the blog of one of the "natural lie detectors" identified by Ekman's research, Eyes for Lies. Also recounted is the story of the Dream Machine's inspiration by Brion Gysin's passing down a tree-lined lane and experiencing alternating light and dark at the approximate frequency of the brain's alpha-wave rhythm. This was a familiar story to me; my old upstairs neighbours had a copy of the original book Warren cites, and they had a homemade Dream Machine in their apartment. From what I understand, they never actually managed to induce any hypnagogia with it though. Nevertheless, I am very interested to try some of the techniques outlined in this book.

A hostile boyfriend, a littered freezer

I think I had a fairly coherent dream in the middle of the night or early in the morning. However, later, after waking briefly and then going back to bed, I had one of those rambling, disconnected dreams that seems characteristic of that sort of late-morning nap, and it displaced any memory of the earlier dream.

*****

I am in bed, on the phone with my friend H. I am talking on a white, corded telephone; I have it in the bed beside me. I fall asleep talking to her. I wake up, listen to see if she's still on the phone, and hear what sounds to be she and her fiance K having sex, so I hang up.

Later, I come downstairs to find H sleeping (apparently postcoitally) on the couch. I think, "Didn't she realise [my boyfriend] D was here [at her house] too? He could have walked in any moment." A man comes into the house; I presume he is K, although he doesn't look like I remember him. D makes some innocuous remark such as "Good afternoon," and the man takes it as an insult and becomes immediately aggressive. "What did you say?" he asks. D prudently replies "I didn't say anything." I look at the man more closely, trying to figure out whether or not he really is K. I notice that this man's ears are not pierced, and I know K has probably about 2 gauge holes in his earlobes. [Another big difference is that the dream man has shoulder-length hair, while K is bald, but I don't think I made that connexion in the dream.] I start to realise that this is not K, but rather a disturbingly aggressive man that H had taken up with during a period that she and H were broken up. [No such thing happened in real life, and no such man exists.] I conclude that H and K have broken up again, and that other man is back in the picture. The man is already becoming somewhat threatening toward D and me. I don't want to be staying at H's house with him around. I see a cat that looks like my cat C and remember that C is here also and we have to take her home with us. I pick up the cat, and I'm not sure-- is this my cat C, or is this H's cat?

There is some problem with my refrigerator/freezer. I look inside the freezer and remove three large plastic pieces (are these interior pieces supposed to be removable?) There seems to be lots of dirt and debris in the freezer. I have to stand on a stepstool to reach all the way inside to clean it out. The bottom two steps of the stool are not firm when you stand on them but springy, so they depress under your weight and feel somewhat unstable. [In the dream, that seems to be a normal design for a stepstool.] With just my toes on the stepstool, hanging most of my weight on the top of the closed fridge door which is at chest level for me even on the stool, I reach deep inside the freezer compartment to clean it out. With a paper towel I sweep out a bunch of orange fluid. I remove some cotton, a Q-tip, some random detritus. I find a piece of blue felt that apparently used to line the freezer pushed deep in the back and pull that out, tossing it to the floor.

D's father says we are only renting and aren't responsible for the refrigerator. I come down off the stepstool and join a small gathering of D's family. A round table holds a small buffet of snacks and appetisers; a platter of chicken wings surrounded by carrot and celery sticks is the centerpiece. The chicken wings taste more like vinaigrette than buffalo sauce. I am collecting a little "bouquet" of alternating one- and two-bone wing pieces which I plan to fasten together somehow and save for later. D's father continues about some woman we should bring in on this dispute over the fridge. He says something like "You know she's good because most of the time they only refer to her as 'older;' only when they know they have someone coming in they say that she is 'better.'" And he adds something about her son living some place instead of Massachusetts, or maybe it was that the son lived in Massachusetts instead of some place else-- the logic here was something like the son is smart and knows how to attain the best lifestyle, so you can tell this woman is really good.

*****
The phone I talk to H on in bed is the telephone my grandmother had in her bedroom when I was very young. I remember when she got it; she had always had rotary telephones, and this new white phone was the first push-button phone she got. I think she got it before my parents got one, which would make it the first push-button phone we had in my family. When you picked it up, a light behind the buttons came on and illuminated them, so you could see them clearly even in a dark room. Later this phone became my bedroom phone in my room at our (my parents' and my) house. I think I took it while my grandmother was still alive because she got a new phone, but I don't remember for sure; it's possible I didn't get it until after she died. As I mentioned in another post, the artefacts of my early life have been on my mind lately.

All dressed up and no place to go

I am dressed up in a fancy dress, make up, and high heels for my friend and music teacher N's [birthday?] party. I am not actually invited to the party but just going to see him and give him my best wishes. [This is not strange in the dream, it's somehow normal or expected.] He greets me in the hall outside his apartment, and then he retires into his apartment as guests start to arrive.

I lie down in the hallway outside N's apartment. [This hallway does not at all resemble N's actual building.] In the dream, N's apartment opens off a small hallway that has no other apartments off it. The hallway has a couch against one wall, under a large, bright window. I seem to spend a long time on the floor, either reading a book or napping. Then another of N's students arrives, an attractive blond guy. Apparently he is early for his lesson, so he sits on the couch to wait. I get up on the couch too and we start making conversation. My dress has ties on it that fasten at the back on the waist. I ask the blond to tie these for me and he does, with me kneeling on the couch facing its back, looking out the window. I look toward N's door to check if he is ready for the blond, and I see the door is ajar, signaling that N is ready.

The blond and I go inside. [The inside of N's apartment in the dream, while not exactly accurate to real life, does quite closely resemble N's actual apartment.] I have some more conversation with N. The blond sits at the piano and starts to warm up while I speak to N over by a mirror. I tell N that I am "super-hot" for the blond guy. [N actually does have a blond male student that I find quite attractive, but the dream guy doesn't really look like him.] N replies that he is too. I find this remark very cryptic. I know N doesn't mean he is sexually attracted to the blond, so he must mean something else, but what? The blond has become quite bored with waiting for N's attention, and starts watching television, flipping through channels. N gives me a hug that seems to want to progress to picking me up off the floor and swinging me around in a circle, but it doesn't. [It would be quite a trick if it did; N isn't even in my weight class.] I remark that "My dad is 6'2"; he would be able to swing me." [My dad actually is 6'1".]

I leave N's apartment, but there is a "third-person" interlude where I see the action in N's apartment even though I am not there. The blond is so annoyed at being kept waiting that he retaliates by playing the same song on the piano over and over a hundred times to annoy N.

I go home, which in the dream is a rectangular purple house. There is a driveway that goes all the way around the house like a U. I am near the bottom of the U to the left of the house when I see headlights coming down toward me. I consider going back up to the sidewalk to get out of the way, but I decide that will put me right in the car's path, so instead I continue around the U and back up around the right side of the house. I walk up a couple steps onto the porch. The front door seems wrong; I expect two large square screened cutouts in the door, one above the other; instead there are two large squares of wood in these positions. These squares are painted a lighter purple than the rest of the house. I wonder if I have beaten D home. I ring the bell [or did I knock?] and D answers the door. I come in. D asks where I was and I remind him about N's party.

*****

At my last music lesson, I commented on the height of N's doorway (it seemed small to me) and mentioned my 6'4" uncle; this exchange must have prompted the mention of 6'2" in the dream. I have always been very disappointed at my short stature. I used to wear 3" heels on a regular basis, both to be taller and give my legs and ass a sexier line. Since gaining weight some years ago, I have not been able to wear high heels.

The two elements that stand out the most in this dream are my appearance, and windows. I am dressed up and made up in the dream, wearing high heels, and my long black hair is down. I actually have never had long black hair; I've had long hair, and I've had black hair, but I've never had long black hair. Long black hair in the dream goes along with my "idealised" appearance. In the dream I am very aware of my attire, the way one is in real life when all dressed up and not completely comfortable. I very much like to be all dressed up and used to dress up often (at least once a week), but since putting on weight, I haven't bought anything but purely practical clothes, so getting all fancied up hasn't been part of my life for a while. I think my propensity to favour an elabourate costume and makeup is part of my theatrical nature. Before my weight gain, I had at least my body and a provocative style of dress to draw attention to myself; now even that avenue of "theatricality" is closed to me.

The second motif that I notice in this dream is windows. There is a window behind the couch; N and I talk by a mirror (in some ways very like a window); my odd purple house has two large square cutouts in its door. The window at N's home is bright and airy; it looks out on a beautiful vista. When I return home, I unexpectedly find the cutouts in my door sealed. I always intended to pursue a career in performance, but didn't really know how to go about it. While I did the "normal" things (get a degree, get a job in an office), I was still planning on pursuing this career. (When? I don't really know. I thought, abstractly, that I would build a performance career while maintaining my full time office job, but practical realities make that plan fairly unworkable.) Without my even noticing it, the window to start such a career closed, and now I find myself older than an ingenue, trapped in a mundane job I can't stand.

This dream is very similar to the one I described in "Outside the party," even including a similar male stranger. It also includes a professional musician (N) who is known for dressing in an outlandishly flamboyant style. I myself am at my most attractive, but even so, I am not invited to the party; I sleep on the floor outside until it is over, and then I may enter to converse with its host. Clearly this dream is one more in the pile I am amassing of dreams concerned with my thwarted ambitions of performing.

A muddy swath, an archaic shop

There is a long narrow grassy strip which shades into a dirt strip, and then to mud. There is a narrow strip of water perpendicular to the grass/dirt strip. I am with one or two other people, and maybe some children. I have to walk along the dirt strip. My shoes or boots are getting very muddy. I get all the way to the end and turn around to come back. Now there really isn't any solid area left; it's all soft mud or muddy water. On my way back, I get completely muddy all the way up my chest. When I reach the starting point I enter this place sort of like a gas station; I want to get cleaned up.

That gas station place is now someone's home, or maybe it's a combination home/shop. I go in past the first room (a kitchen, I think) into a sitting room. Everything in the place has a pall of age, like an old aunt's house where she hasn't changed anything for thirty years. There is a television on, but there is no or very low sound. Across the room on a small end table or tray table is an old-looking radio with a wooden cabinet. [It doesn't look like any actual antique radio I have ever seen, but more like something I might come up with if asked to design an original "antique" radio.] I have to adjust this radio to hear the television sound. The volume control is a small smooth silver knob on the radio's left side. By the time I go to set the channel, I have forgotten it again. I think that it is something like 1013 AM, but that doesn't seem to be it. I go back to the side of the room where the television is and consult some reference. I find that it is in fact an FM frequency, 1.14 FM [maybe it was 101.14 FM, but maybe I just think that on waking because 101.14 makes more sense than 1.14]. When I turn back to the side of the room where the radio is, I notice an old woman is sitting in a chair to the left of the radio. The old woman lives here, but I don't know who she is personally. I get the radio tuning adjusted. I go back through the kitchen and look outside from the doorway. I see a wave, a minor offspring from the tsunami, roll down the narrow waterway.

*****

Recently I watched the movie Slums of Beverly Hills. In one scene of the movie, a Lady Remington shaver can be seen on a nightstand. My grandmother had this exact razor and I was always fascinated with it, probably mostly because of the way the cylindrical two-compartment box opens by swinging out on a pivot. I even used the razor a few times as a young girl before I started shaving with a regular blade. I had completely forgotten about this shaver; I hadn't thought about it in years until I saw it in that movie. Thinking about it reminded me of other items in my grandmother's house that always held a special fascination for me. The wooden headboard of her bed had a radio built into it; the middle of the headboard featured a small white power/volume knob and a large white dial shaped like a disk with an arrow head that pointed to the selected frequency and a tail opposite the pointer. I think the knob and dial were meant to look like ivory (though I believe they were plastic). When you turned the knob, it took some time before it actually came on. I think the point of the dial arrow lit up a dim orange. Since it was only an AM radio, the sort of programming that I ever heard on it, talk programmes or strange old staticky music, was quite incomprehensible to my five- or six-year-old self which made it all the more intriguing. On a shelf above a counter near a window in my grandmother's kitchen were a small assortment of knickknacks and an old Motorola radio. If it wasn't the exact one shown in the picture, it was one very like it. I always liked the look of it. I remember my grandmother playing some radio programme of Polish polkas on it.

I also thought about my Aunt M's and Uncle D's house. (Aunt M was really my grandmother's aunt.) They must have died when I was less than ten years old, so these are really ancient memories. Aunt M lived in a farm house on a vineyard. Her water came from a well so we were always being reminded to conserve it. Everything in her house was old in that way that makes it strange and bewitching to a small child-- similar to the things you know well from your own home but just different enough to be eerily unfamiliar.

I think all this rumination on these artefacts is responsible for the appearance of the home/shop place in my dream, and the decidedly Aunt M-like lady who inhabited it. The weird setup with the radio and television in my dream clearly was inspired by my recent viewing of an episode of the The Ricky Gervais Show in which Karl Pilkington tells about man who had two broken television sets; one had no picture and the other no sound-- by using them together, he could receive a complete broadcast.

The wave in my dream has so much in common with that in this youtube video I saw the other day of the tsunami reaching a canal in Hawaii that I am certain it was derived from that image.

A bitter argument

In reality, I am trying to get a small food business off the ground. The business is named after my friend and music teacher N; his likeness appears on its labels. Currently I am making preparations for a vending event I am planning to attend this summer.

*****

I am taking a music lesson with N. [His apartment in the dream does not reflect his actual apartment.] Before I leave, he shows me some t-shirts that have been printed up advertising my food business. I had had some items in my shopping cart at an online printing service, including some experimental t-shirt designs which I had not intended to purchase. Apparently N had checked out everything in my cart and now I was stuck with hundreds of dollars' worth of advertising materials in a design I did not want. I am very angry and I say I had not intended to order these items. I leave N's apartment, and a few blocks away meet my boyfriend D. I tell D how mad I am and he convinces me to go back and tell N so. D offers to come with me. D and I go back to N's and I tell him very angrily that it was not up to him to check out my cart. I say that I am trying to get a business started and that he has cost me a lot of money. N becomes angry with me and says "Fuck you." I say "No, fuck you!" and give him the middle finger, and I leave again. [Some more stuff happens here that I don't remember.] Later that day, I meet N again and he apologises for getting mad and telling me "Fuck you." I accept and we reconcile.

*****

The meaning of this dream seems quite clear. I often think that N has some unreasonable expectations, for instance, insisting that lessons be rescheduled rather than simply missed for contingencies such as illness or inclement weather. D supports my opinion, but knows I have a hard time confronting N about this issue. When some circumstance causes me to have to miss a music lesson, I get very stressed at the thought of having to notify N; D always offers to call him for me, but I never accept this offer as it is my problem to handle. At our last meeting I mentioned to N that I thought it should be acceptable to miss a lesson now and then when unforeseeable conflicts arise. When N replied that allowing cancelations in such cases is the beginning of a slippery slope towards students' feeling they can cancel without notice any time they please, I pointed out to him that while that might be a valid objection generally, he has known me for many years and should have confidence in my diligence; I honour all my commitments and cutting me a little slack the few times a year that something comes up is not going to lead to a general deterioration in my attendance. He acknowledged that perhaps some more leniency is warranted in my case and said he would consider that in the future.

In the dream, the argument was much more belligerent than any conversation I ever have had with N. There are many occasions when I think he is being unreasonable but I tone down my opinion or don't voice it at all. In the dream I got the chance to really lash out. Also, in the dream, even though N is the one who has stepped out of line by checking out my shopping cart, it is he who exhibits hostility in the argument first. I get to scream in anger at N while preserving my self-image as "nice" and "reasonable" by yelling "fuck you" only after N has instigated the altercation.

A hysterical non sequitur

What a hectic week this has been. I have been getting to bed late and waking up painfully tired with no memory of any dreams. Here is a dream I had as a preteen or early adolescent.

*****

I am in the garage of my family's house. My father [maybe it was both my parents] is on a ladder trying to fix something. I am on the ladder too. One of my parents says something explaining the next step we will take to fix what we are working on. I seriously doubt that this plan is going to work, and expressing my expectation of how I think it more likely to turn out, I (only half-seriously) remark, "Crash, as we hit the ceiling." This pronouncement strikes me as so hilarious I wake up laughing hysterically.

*****

In fact, for the next several days I could not relate that statement from the dream without breaking into hysterics. Even just thinking of that phrase would send me off laughing.

You can't always get what you want

I am at an outdoor music festival, the sort of affair where you camp in the woods for a couple of nights and listen to jam bands all day. It seems to be the particular festival that I go to every year [although its physical layout in the dream is not accurate to the real festival].

I have a pipe; I seem to have a plan to "get the pipe ready" before finding someone from whom to buy some weed. "Getting the pipe ready" seems to mean lighting it four times. Lighting the pipe itself four times; it seems to light like a candle. I am walking through the large, mostly empty field, stopping every now and then and lighting the pipe, then blowing it out. After I have lit it the required number of times, I start on my way back to my trailer [I don't really have any trailer; I always bring a tent to this thing] where I plan to put away my pipe before setting out to locate some pot. When the trailer is in sight but before I reach it, I hear the opening French horn line of "You Can't Always Get What You Want." I'm singing along with this line, and then singing along with the lyrics of the first verse which seems to have been layered over the French horn part. It's really beautiful and I was very disappointed that my alarm woke me at just this moment.

*****

I had a dream featuring this festival a few months ago. The version of the fest in that dream was different from both the version in this dream and the real-life fest.

Recently I decided that I want to learn to play the saxophone. I have been reading about them and looking around to buy one. I was thinking about what that French horn line would sound like on the saxophone, either in the dream or just after I woke up, I'm not sure which. I think the pipe in the dream represented another kind of pipe, the musical kind. Last night's episode of The Simpsons featured guest stars Cheech and Chong; that could be somewhat responsible for the particular form the representation took. The common association of marijuana with musicians is probably also involved. Also, recently my piano teacher has been prodding me to play "Memory of a Free Festival," which may have put festivals on my mind.

The appearance of "You Can't Always Get What You Want" might show I am trying to accept the reality that I am not going to be a professional performer, but also that I am trying to embrace my new pursuits ("sometimes you get what you need") of writing and perhaps playing the saxophone.