QUESTIONS ABOUT LUCID DREAMING

This morning when I got out of bed, I walked out on the front porch and squinted at the heavens to see if I could glimpse the blood moon that was forecast to appear. I had been reading about the eclipse for several days and anticipated that I could glimpse it if I searched the heavens long enough. Outdoors, all I saw was the effects of a blustery storm that had passed through Sewanee last night—limbs down, heaps of wet leaves, and more of the crop of large green acorns shaken from the white oaks surrounding our cottage.

At the breakfast table, the topic of conversation moved quickly from "no blood moon" to lucid dreaming, a subject about which I know very little. However, a blurb on the Internet intrigued me because the lucid dream trainer talked about keeping a dream journal, a practice I once tried. I confess that I failed miserably in my attempt to enhance creativity and poetry writing through the process of recording dreams.

The basic premise of lucid dream training is that the dreamer can gain some control over certain actions in a dream or can manipulate the experience within a dream to assure him that the dream isn't real. Better still, nightmare sufferers can benefit from learning techniques for controlling dreams to develop an awareness of how to dispel the boogabears that plague them. Sometimes lucid dreams occur naturally when a dreamer experiences a strange happening, and when she stops to determine if the dream is real, she realizes she's in a dream. I guess you could call this a "reality check." Readers will be surprised to read about the number of trainings in lucid dreaming that appear on the internet and about the number of advocates of the lucid dreaming practice.

After I read several Internet entries, I pondered Wittgenstein's famous saying, "We are asleep. Our life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know we are dreaming." Was Wittgenstein a lucid dreamer?

Last month, I published Night Offices, a book of poetry about insomniacs who "recite the night offices," and this morning as I re-read it, I wondered if the inspiration for writing poetry occurs naturally within a lucid dream state and is responsible for the awake "aha" moment of creative expression that follows the nighttime dream. Many famous musicians conceived nocturnes and symphonies during night hours, and sleep experts often advise us to "sleep on it" when we have a particular problem that we can't solve during the daytime. Are we in a natural-occurring lucid dream state at that time?

The subject fascinates me because I'm not only an insomniac, I'm a victim of nightmares, and I'd like to lay to rest the phantoms of the night that often assail me.

Here's an example of a poem in Night Offices that may or may not have been born in a lucid dream:

"THE SOUND OF AN INSOMNIAC'S INK

If I were to arise

and go into my study,

watch shadows flicker on the walls

rather than entangle myself

in the warm sheets of insomnia

that Benjamin Franklin

would have left to cool awhile

while he battled his sleeplessness,

I would open the blind

to the sight of stars scattering

in the inky sky,

their silver points piercing

my Unconscious, bringing up

words to a blue screen

winking on a fresh page,

and I would ponder

how I miss, at night,

(and during daylight hours)

typewriter keys clacking

in a disharmony of sound,

executing words with loud taps,

making sure the darkness knew

I had not written my last stanza,

a sound signaling

that someone out there

would soon be turning pages

in a quiet room,

and the poems,

by their noise alone,

would know they had a right to live."

Note: This poem may have been more of a lament for an old-fashioned typewriter than an ode born in a state of lucid dreaming!!

DOODLING…



My doodle!

 Yesterday, as I talked on the telephone with a friend in an extended conversation, I crossed the threshold of an exercise I hadn’t done in years – doodling. I looked at the doodle after I hung up, wondering why I had crossed that threshold since the conversation hadn’t involved a boring exchange; in fact, I had been intensely interested in brainstorming about the subject. For years, I’ve thought that when you doodled, you had a strong disinterest in the conversation, lecture, or sermon, and that doodling was a way of entertaining yourself when you were bored with the subject.

Doodling is associated with absentmindedness, and the origins of the word hark back to “fool;” thus the word gives readers the idea that the doodler may be just wasting time or dawdling, creating scribbles that are meaningless. Most of us can remember doodling in class and have dismissed it as a useless exercise, a way of daydreaming, rather than concentrating on the lecturer’s discourse. Not so!

According to experts on visual-spatial learning, some visual learners are doodlers and actually learn more effectively by doodling. Doodling reinforces ideas and has an effect on memory retention, helps the brain to focus, and actually keeps our minds from wandering! So if you’re a doodler you shouldn’t be ashamed of this useful exercise – you may be processing data.

On the negative side, the author Sunni Brown says that the most offensive definition of doodling that’s touted today is “To doodle officially means to dawdle, to dilly dally, to monkey around, to make meaningless marks, to do something of little value, substance or import…to do nothing…” Obviously, the author of this definition has no sketching ability and I might suggest, has a poor memory!

I’m not defending my doodle at the beginning of this blog, but when I looked at it, I entertained myself by attempting to analyze the picture, especially the lower part where I seem to be levitating, while my head has all these sprockets that look like the choices I was trying to make while conversing on the telephone. A friend saw the result and suggested that I keep it to remind me that I’m creative on days when I say that I have nothing creative to share with the world, or perhaps just to bring a belly laugh that we enjoyed while viewing the picture.

Famous doodlers include Thomas Jefferson, Bill Clinton, and the poet John Keats. Then there’s Sylvia Plath, the confessional poet, who ended her life by sticking her head in an oven and turning on the gas – which really isn’t a very reassuring example of a prime doodler.



Signature doodler

Signature doodlers represent another form of doodling. In fact, some signatures, particularly those of physicians, are challenging forms of scribbling and impinge on the definition: “meaningless marks.” Isabel, my neighbor and good friend in Iran doodled a self portrait each time she signed her name, and I am including that doodle signature to conclude this essay in defense of the activity of doodling. As a postscript, I read that mathematician Stanislaw Ulam developed the Ulam spiral for visualization of prime numbers while doodling, which is a good enough endorsement for me.
Happy doodling!