Subconscious Lucidity

Dreams fascinate me. They always have, and I hope they always will. I find the dream state so much better than reality. In dreams I get to talk to people I could never talk to in real life, do things I'm not capable of, and generally create bizarre hybrids of different locations as I mix and match individuals from reality and fiction. I don't always remember my dreams, but the vivid ones stay with me forever. And whether or not I remember a dream when I wake up, there's always the sense that I was dreaming and the desire to cling to that alternate reality and return. Occasionally I'm glad to wake up, usually when a dream mirrors the stress of reality, past or present, and I find myself faced with a difficult assignment, deadline, or personal crisis.

For some reason Thursday is the night the week catches up to me, and I'm exhausted. Though by Friday night I've put in a full week, I think the promise of a weekend gives me energy, while on Thursday I'm just thinking about that one more day I need to get through. So Waking Life was probably a tough film to tackle in such a state, especially after the frivolity of various sitcoms I'd just watched. An animated film rendered in several fluid styles, it’s light on plot and heavy on philosophy and conversation. The basic premise is the plight of a young man who wanders through several philosophical discussions, sometimes as an observer, other times as a participant, and gradually realizes he's in a dream state. He has several false awakenings, in which small clues like not being able to read the numbers on his clock reveal that he's still in a dream.

It's been a while since I stimulated my brain in such a fashion, and I admit to struggling with some of the literary references and intellectual terms. Each conversation and viewpoint is fleeting and shifts after a few minutes, and the movie itself plays out not unlike a dream. It raises a lot of interesting questions about dreams, and one couple's conversation deals with the few minutes of brain activity beyond death, how a few minutes could be an eternity in the subconscious, plenty of time to look back and reflect on our lives and experiences. I also found the notion of a shared consciousness interesting, how people sometimes reach the same conclusions or advances independent of one another, like we're tuned in to the same frequency.

I locked on to the concept of a lucid dream more than any other presented in the film. I have at times reached the awareness of being in a dream, and have been able to push and influence minor changes to the events playing out in my brain, usually waking up shortly after. Once I realize I'm in a dream, it's not long before the conscious sections of my brain exert too much control and I return to the real world. One of the characters in the film advises the protagonist to look for clues such as that aforementioned clock face, or to try flipping light switches on and off. If he's able to flip a switch without the light state changing, that's an indication of being in a dream. I'm hoping to test that theory.

As I've mentioned, while usually entertaining vacations into hybrid locales, I have occasionally found myself somewhere as mundane as a classroom or an office. This too is addressed and lamented in the film, the tragedy of spending so many waking hours toiling for someone else only to dedicate a portion of our dream time to work as well. In a lucid dream, I'd be able to take charge in such a situation and change my activity or location. There are only so many hours in the day, and sometimes I fight sleep to be able to watch one more movie or get some more reading done, to spend time on myself rather than others, selfish though that may sound. Sometimes our lives become so routine that we become sleepwalkers, moving through repetitious activities without conscious thought. We're awake, but our minds are asleep. I love the notion that my body could be asleep and my mind could remain awake. The comic book geek in me speculates the attainment of a superhuman intellect. The bored guy is thinking about all the sexy parties he could throw.

I think the common notion about dreams is that every “character” is in essence ourselves, that since it is playing out in our brains these avatars are all speaking to us with the voice of our own subconscious. In Waking Life, the main character seems to get quite a bit of new information from the people he interacts with. Are these things he's overheard in the background in the real world, split seconds that his subconscious recorded without him being consciously aware? Or does it hint to that notion of telepathy, of some loose connection between all of us in which our ideas are somehow improbably pooled? It seems unlikely that the electrical impulses firing in one self-contained biological computer would somehow have a wireless connection to another self-contained biological computer, but its a marvelous notion with endless possibilities. It all certainly has my neurons firing, and I will be researching techniques for lucid dreaming. If you should someday see a mysterious cloaked figure lurking on the edges of your subconscious, wonder if he's a product of your brain, or mine....