Border between sleep and dream, by Jennifer (aka Fer)
On the morning of the Oneironauticum, I woke up and observed the process I went through to remember my dreams, a sort of scan of memory, both trying and relaxing, an exercise of recall. I remembered two dreams that way. Once I had exhausted my thought process, while I still laid in bed in a hazy close to sleep/dream state, I then began randomly shifting through thoughts/images, the ocean, my home, the act of walking, a feeling of pleasure. Eventually, one of these images dislodged something and I remembered a third dream, and another part of the second.
In one of those dreams, I paced around a grassy rise thinking about what I would say to the Oneironauticum group the next night. I watched my feet as I did this, shifting around some pebbles with my toe.
Throughout the day on Saturday, I continually shifted my viewpoint and attempting to experience my surroundings and actions as if in a dream. At one point in the day, as I walked up the back steps from the laundry room watching my feet as I climbed, I realized I was wearing the same shoes as in the dream the night before. In that moment, the image of my foot in that specific shoe, the act of looking down at my feet, crossed the boundary between awake and dreaming like a tesseract, or a portal. The two worlds merged, or superimposed, a moment of being in both at once.
The night of the Oneironauticum, I had a hard time falling asleep, repeatedly drifting down to almost the point of sleep but then waking again. I noticed that each time I came close to sleep, I felt a tingly electric buzz throughout my body and a sort of pulling sensation, as if the sleep state had a physical suction drawing me in. When finally I fell asleep, I had a brief lucid dream. In it, I walked into a room and saw Jacob, one of our physically present Oneironauticum participants. Though a prodigious dreamer, Jacob has never actually become lucid in a dream. When I saw him, I remembered that fact and became lucid myself. I pointed to him and yelled “you’re a dream!” As often happens, the excitement of becoming lucid woke me up. As I surfaced out of the dream, however, I realized I was experiencing the same sensations as I had sinking into sleep, the buzz and the pull. It was as if the border between conscious and unconscious exerted a gravitational pull that extended from the place where one passes from one state into the other, sort of like this:
Both the portal of the shoe moment, that landed me simultaneously in both waking and dreaming worlds, and my approach of the border, from both sides, between conscious and unconscious made this Oneironauticum very much about perceiving the boundary between waking and sleep.
I’m excited that the urbandreamscape’s blog is up! I’ve been appreciating from afar for a while now.
The sensations mentioned in this post sound like hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences – those gateways between worlds. I especially am intrigued by the parallels that seem to be emerging from waking and dreaming life (the shoe portals) while your dream incubations events are ongoing. Sounds like the gateways are opening even farther…
Yes indeed, Im familiar with the gravitational pull. For me, it is ultra real, almost as if you are stepping outside of time, or experiencing infinitive deja vu’s or something. You are lucky that its only a tingling buzz for you. For me it feels like 100,000 volts of electricity and elephants sitting on my body parts. It’s so intense in fact, that Im unable to walk consciously into dreams because I have a fight or flight response. I know that if I could just hold my awareness steady, that I would pass consciously back and forth between each state.