First Blog Ever

Alright, so I for the first time in quite a long while, had a very vivid dream, and I mean very vivid. I think it is interesting because of the discussion yesterday about dreams and how they might be connected to our vision of reality. I think this dream was particularly noteable because not only was it a completely new dream to me (most of the dreams I had in the past were similar in setting and events) but it was am interesting experience as well, one that had never happened to me before. So my dream, since it’s so early in the morning and I just woke up really, it’s rather fresh in my mind. It seemed to me like I was in a cafeteria-ish setting because I remember a good number of people in the area and then I was there at a table as well and it was very dark, with dimly lit lights coming from somewhere. So I could see one of my roommates, who apparently had made someone feel bad because I later remember overhearing a conversation on a cell phone asking why he made that someone feel bad and well apparently it was not him but the person he was with whom that someone was mad at (did you follow all that?) Anyway, now here comes the strange part. I am sitting at a table with someone (not sure who) and I was counting my money from my wallet, I had it all spread out on the small table. Then this guy comes by (he looked Mexican to me) and asks if he can have change for some of his larger bills (noteably a $5 bill in exchange for $1’s) and for some reason I’m on the alert because I seem to have had the suspicion that he was going to steal my money so I kept an eye on him while I pulled out some ones. Sure enough, he bends down toward the floor and takes a $20 off the table (another interesting note is that I recognized my bills as American but I don’t know what kind of bills the guy had, they seemed to have really large numbers like a 20 but taking up one side of the bill… anyway) and as he does that, I stand up and start to say (not verbatim), “I saw you take that now give it back.” Well, he didn’t really like that I caught him and he gave it back, took his bills he put on the table and threatened me and walked away. Then it gets kind of fuzzy for me to remember everything but I recall an encounter with him in the same building; he tries to grab me by the collar and lift me up but I don’t let him and instead I think I knee him in the stomach amd bring him to the ground. Then the next thing I remember happening was I was walking down a sidewalk and it was dark again with a streetlamp sort of object giving off some orangeish light. Worried about the man’s threat I begin to walk semiquickly, not running but more like powerwalking, and I have my eyes closed because I had the idea to rely on my other senses, namely hearing, to tell what’s happening around me because it’s dark. I then hear footsteps and I don’t open my eyes and I continue walking… Now this is the weird part I mentioned earlier… I am gonna assume that the footsteps belonged to the guy that threatened me and so I hear them and I open my eyes to look around but I don’t see anyone around me or in the small radius of light surrounding the ground I was walking on but I hear the words, “I’m alone” and to me these are from the guy trying to say no one else is here except him, so I then decide to try and wake up in “reality” in an attempt to escape (an odd concept considering that in class we talked about dreams as an escape but here I am trying to escape from the dream) and well, that didn’t work out so well. I opened my eyes and I must have still been stuck in “dream-mode” because I could see my dorm room in the dim light from the grating in the door but I also saw (or thought I saw) someone else in the room and was trying to figure out who of my roommates was awake. Well, it wasn’t either of them and I can only assume it was the same guy from my dream. Thoroughly freaked out, I closed my eyes again and for some reason recall placing my palms together at 90 degree angles to my forearms and telling myself to wake up; I then wake up in a normal fashion, my heart pounding at the strange dream experience I had just experienced for the first time.

I began to think about this from a technical standpoint the moment I woke up (shortly after thinking, “Hey! I’ve got a blog and now a completely relevant story as well!”) because I must have been aware, to some extent, that I was dreaming because I was able to wake myself up. Th fact that I saw someone else in my room did not scare me as much as I thought it would have (nothing much beyond the elevated heart rate right after waking up) and then it struck me that I could see with my eyes certain elements from my dream and began to wonder how that could be possible. I looked at the same spot where I thought I saw someone and I was unable to make out any kind of figure similar to what I had seen while I was dreaming which means that I really did see something from my dream (it also occurred to me that my opening my eyes and seeing someone in my dorm room could have been in my dream and my eyes never may have opened at all except, and this one is for you Dr. C because of what you said about clocks always being unreadable when dreaming, I had woken up just minutes before awaking from this dream experience thing; I woke up at about 4 and thought to myself, “Its barely four” and turned onto my other side and went back to sleep. Then, after waking up from this weird dream experience thing, I looked at my clock and only like 7 minutes or so had gone by (the actual time was 4:03 but I remember the aforementioned “about 4″ was around 3:56-3:57)). So if I really had opened my eyes, how is it possible that I could have seen something from my dream? I imagine a sort of projection system projecting my dream onto my eyes from the inside. The reason I only saw the “someone” and not the rest of my dream is because he was part of the foreground and not the background. What I mean by that is if any of you have ever used the iSight camera for video chat on a Mac, it has some features that allow a moving background but in order to use it effectively the background (what is behind you when you are looking at the camera) has to be static, that is it has to be completely still or else the moving background won’t look right. Think of the eye lids as the projection screen for the background and the “someone” as a foreground element and there it is; my eye lids come up and thus the background is now gone an I can see my room, but the foreground (the “someone”) is still able to be seen.
Well since I typed all of this out on the Notes app on my iPhone, my fingers are kind of tired and since it is 5:08 AM and I have effectively spent almost an hour typing this, I think I am gonna go back to sleep and email this to myself for a copy/paste and subsequent post onto my blog. Goodnight everyone!

Thanks as usual ^_^

EC

~ by erix on November 11, 2009. Tagged: baylor_nms_f09, dreams