Lucid

When I was five-years-old, I had a nightmare that I will never forget. In it, every adult I knew was wearing a mask that looked exactly like their real face, only I knew that it wasn’t their real face. I knew that they weren’t really the people they were supposed to be. I knew it in that deep-down-in-your-gut way that you know things in dreams. I ran around in a panic, tearing the paper thin masks off the faces of my Kindergarten teacher, my bus driver, my parents, my friends’ parents. But underneath each mask there was another mask and another one under that and another and another. Layer after layer of paper thin masks and no matter how many times I tore the masks away there was always another mask underneath. My heart pounded uncontrollably in my chest. My breath came in ragged gulps. No one was who they said they were and no one was on my side. I couldn’t find the truth under the masks, even though I tore my fingernails to shreds trying to pull off all the masks. I woke up frightened, the dream lingering in my mind so that it bled into reality. Were my parents my parents, or had they been replaced by creatures wearing masks that perfectly matched their faces? The dream faded eventually, but it left me unsettled and uncertain.

Not long after I had that dream, my mother gave me a strategy for falling asleep after waking up from bad dreams. She told me a story about the family of foxes that had a den near our house and then she told me that whenever I had a bad dream I should tell myself that story – or any other story – and I wouldn’t be afraid anymore. I can’t remember the specifics of that story anymore, but I know that it helped me to be less frightened when I woke up from my nightmares.

As I grew older, I found myself becoming more aware during my dreams, more conscious. This was around the same time I discovered Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness Quartet and soon, whenever I had a bad dream, I was able to summon a red-haired, sword-wielding woman into my dream and rescue me from my nightmare.

At the time, I was not aware that there was such a thing as lucid dreaming. I didn’t know that most other people didn’t experience dreams as vividly as I did, that they couldn’t directly influence the course of events in there dreams.

Gradually, I became more adept at controlling my dreams, especially my nightmares, and I know longer needed Alana the Lioness to rescue me. I learned to rescue myself, to take control of my dream body and change the course of my dream.

Once I dreamed that I was at summer camp in Colorado and the girls in my cabin and I were being attacked by the undead monsters from Garth Nix’s Abhorsen Trilogy. They were the ugliest things with rotting flesh and long needle-like claws that were razor sharp. Their legs were jointed like a goat’s – backwards – and they were long and stretched and thin like elastic skeletons. I knew I couldn’t outrun them. So I took out my pocket knife, selected the longest blade (maybe two and a half inches long) and drove the monster off.

I was completely aware that I was dreaming and yet completely submersed in the dream. I could have woken up at any moment and yet I was soundly asleep.  I knew that I had to win against those monsters and defeat the nightmare itself. Since then, it’s rare that I have a nightmare I can’t defeat.

Sometimes I wish I could control real life in the same way I can control my dreams. I wish I could just focus hard enough and reality would bend to my will. Then, I could eat whatever I want without feeling sick. Then I could do what I want without having to worry about things like savings, insurance payments, finishing my education. Then I wouldn’t live each day with the fear of doing something wrong.