082418 I couldn’t find any light bulbs that made sense. That should have been my first clue. The girls and I had inherited mom’s house (she wasn’t dead though), and I was going around making a few tweaks here and there, to the arrangement of the furniture and stuff. The light went out over the stove, and I unscrewed it and it was big and round and the glass looked kinda like a mason jar. I looked in every lamp and fixture to try to find a spare one I could put in there, but they were all either too huge or too tiny or had the wrong kind of base, or wouldn’t fit, or didn’t work, or had some complicated system of threads and cords and multi-part construction that I couldn’t even get back together properly in order to put them back where I found them. Now why didn’t I notice how weird that was? Reality checks always include text and numbers (swimming, confusing, fragmentary, impossible to pin down) and lighting (unable to control at will, unpredictable, elusive source). I mean, truly there can be any number of reality checks. The thing is, YOU HAVE TO REMEMBER TO MAKE THEM. That’s why they tell you to make them when you “know” you’re awake, too. Just make them regularly, whether you think it’s day or night, and that way you’ll train yourself so hard to make them all the time, that you’ll end up making one sometime when you really ARE dreaming, and eventually you’ll figure it out. Why is there a whole movement slash corner of the internet devoted to learning how to do this? Why do we want to be able to be aware of our dream state? Quick questions: Is it because we want to control them? Why would we want that? Does awareness of “I am dreaming” change the nature of dreaming and what it “does” for you? Is it like that whole thing where you can’t observe something without changing some aspect of it because you observed it? I mean, obviously it’s sorta like that, but I mean, are you changing whole worlds? Is it kind of like the time travel paradox, where you can’t ever just be a visitor? There’s no tourists in dream world, eh? Like, once you’re there and you drag your tendrils of this (what I THINK is this--reality check? Yeah, the problem with reality checks when you KNOW you’re awake is that they’re so pointless you don’t do them. It’s so obvious you’re awake, that just thinking the thought “reality check” is a sufficient reality check! But maybe that IS enough...) world into the other world, you’ve introduced an invasive species. Your waking thoughts are the garlic mustard of dream world. The continuous narrative of your memory and consciousness is the asian carp of the boundless dream seas. Your waking life is smallpox. Maybe lucid dreaming should be illegal. Let those poor lucky weird hapless wise bizarre dream world denizens live their lives, will you, without insisting on opening a door every night and letting all the stink of mundania rush in and settle over everything like a layer of the dust of mortality. Why you got to do that, anyway? Well, because I want to CONTROL MY DREAM, you say. OK, what does that mean? What is it exactly that you are trying to control? Well, for the most part, it comes down to sex and flying. Isn’t that it, really? Isn’t that the main thing? It’s basically a primal childish fantasy: I want to be able to do anything I want. Period. Usually, the first things I think I want to do is have sex with whoever I want, and fly. But there’s a whole heirarchy of other rules that I enjoy being able to ignore. It’s surprising, the few times it’s actually happened, how much of that simply means being able to destroy stuff. To trash the place and not give a fuck. I don’t think I’m usually mean in my dreams—I used to be quite violent, but it was USUALLY in some kind of righteous rage, not just wanton assault. Well, OK, I admit it, I vaguely remember being pretty horrible a few times. But other times I was either having an adventure on the side of the good guys or even (at least once, I remember, a long long time ago in the back seat of a volkswagen bug in a parking lot of a grocery store) changing the laws of physics and the nature of weaponry to defend my own life from a ne’er-do-well with a gun. I turned my own fingers into an equally powerful gun and said, bang, and they went away. At least that’s the way I remember telling the story to my brother and mother, when they came out of the real grocery store. Oh, it’s getting all twisted up. Is it a real dream memory? Or the memory of a story about a dream? Isn’t the latter all we really get? Yes—UNLESS— Ah yes, I see where you’re going with this. Lucid dreaming. So basically it’s like a holodeck, and your argument is that it’s OK because it can’t possibly hurt anyone because it’s not real. The worst it could be is a masturbatory VR chamber of unfathomable resolution, and at best it could turn into some sort of Jungian, New Age, intellectual spiritual divination trolley where you learn about yourself, explore your deepest urges, get stream-of-consciousness insights, and practice for your big fight. Couldn’t you do all that stuff without being “aware” you were doing it? Yes, but it’s MORE FUN IF YOU CAN DO WHATEVER YOU WANT WITH THE LAWS OF PHYSICS AND THE LAWS OF MAN!!! OK, OK. I understand that part. I’m just saying, it’s possible that they are two completely different experiences. I’m just saying, it’s ONE thing to be put into a chamber that you know is a holodeck, and to know that you have some unspecified amount of finite time to learn something or experience something or figure something out or just have an orgasm; and it’s ANOTHER thing altogether to just be alive in a world, and have to figure out what to do, and not to have any reason to believe you’re not one of the people you’re interacting with, not to have any reason to believe you’re holding the ace of invincibility and immunity. To actually be alive, and killable, and flawed, and subject to the whims and caprices of the natural world around you, that has its own logic that you can barely begin to fathom, because you’re swimming in it (what’s water?), and to be afraid, and to be frustrated, and to be horny, and to be excited, and to be gratified, and to be vulnerable but to risk things anyway. Who knows? Maybe you’d even learn to fly, even surrounded and infused by all that blissful unawareness. Either way, you’re going to wake up eventually. Reality check: make the best of it, whatever it is, whether you’re dreaming or not.