pebblerocker

My partner was watching a documentary the other evening on sleep and dreams, and there was a section on lucid dreaming. It's fascinating to me that it's potentially possible for brains to do that; I think it would be interesting to experience.

Last night I dreamt I was riding around the streets in the area where I used to live on a small purple bicycle with straight handlebars. I rode around for a bit and then I noticed I was riding a larger red bicycle with swept-back handlebars. I was surprised that the bike had changed while I was riding it; I also had a very strong feeling that there was something very important to remember about why bicycles don't change into different bicycles and what it meant that this had happened. I struggled to work out what it was that I needed to remember, what vital fact this clue was telling me - I wrestled hard with it, but the crowd of children running behind me distracted me and I forgot what I was trying to do.

Every time I'm reminded that lucid dreaming exists I seem to have one of these dreams; this one was the closest I've got so far, with not just the realisation that something odd and impossible had happened, but the knowledge that I could deduce something from the impossibility, even though I didn't quite get to the answer. Odd sights in dreams (day into night, childhood home attached to current garden) don't seem to trigger any realisation, but things that feel wrong do. Both bicycles in my dream are real ones that I'm familiar with riding (though only one is mine) and they feel very different, with different riding positions and gears.

It amazes me how much my brain still knows while I'm asleep. I expect it to know things like the layout of the house I lived in longest as a child, and that being at the shops naked is embarrassing, and that zombies are scary and very persistent; I don't expect it to have such a firm grasp of real-life facts, scientific things and the sort of stuff that you get asked in quiz games. Not that I dream strictly factual things, but sometimes while still dreaming there's some part of my brain yelling out while watching, "That aeroplane's got to be well below its stalling speed, physics doesn't work that way!" or, "That theory was taught as fact for several decades but has since been disproven!"

The other night I dreamt that two English police officers discovered a mouse getting into the groceries on their kitchen table, and they drove it away by what, in the dream, was the well-known technique for getting rid of mice: singing the national anthem at it together VERY LOUDLY. Only I knew that these two people ought to be singing God Save the Queen as THEIR national anthem -- and I couldn't quite dredge that song out of memory while asleep, so I had to have them bellowing out "God Defend New Zealand" instead. I was not pleased with this piece of factual inaccuracy but grudgingly accepted that some national anthem was necessary and the dream had to work with what was available.

I dreamt about vol-au-vents on the sea floor with hot water issuing forth and strange life forms growing around them as happens deep down there. I don't know if my brain is making clever puns while I'm asleep or if I'm just very confused by pastry.

And scientists came to study the interesting ecology on the sea floor, riding on moonhoppers. No diving gear, just moonhoppers. I sort of want to draw deep-sea scientists on moonhoppers, with their hair floating in the currents.