LD 02 - Velocity in Dreams

I am supposedly at "square 1" of lucid dreaming again, per last post, but I am really not - I thought about writing about a specific topic on the blog, and promptly had 2 lucid dreams that were already influenced by what I was planning to write about. I kind of needed the idea of *starting anew*, but obviously that's completely arbitrary, I'm just somewhere along the road.

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So, velocity. - Huh? Why do I think about velocity?

Well. Despite the entire surroundings in a dream being decidedly not-real, and therefore not bound to any rules, they usually conform to a lot of assumptions based on what I experience in my daily life in this world.

For example, if something looks far away, then it is supposed to take a while to get there. If something is so far away that I can't even see it (or I just know it's super far away) then it should take even longer.

But why? The only real distance is the one in my mind, right? If I want to go to Africa, all I have to do is make it so Africa starts right aroung the corner. Of course, my mind fights back, because in WL (waking life) this is an absurd statement.

In today´s LD I remembered this idea:

I manage to get out of my bed and into the dream version of the room I am sleeping in. As usual I spend the first moments establishing the dream, I put as much focus as possible into the sensation of my feet on the floor and move away from the bed, through the rest of the flat, and run outside into the inner courtyard. IRL, there is not much to go after that, a fence would block the way into the garden. In my dreams however, this fence usually doesn't exist, and I can run directly onto the meadow. I can feel the grass under my naked feet - that was another thing I was wondering about recently, how much sensation I really had in my dreams, since I often don't spend any thought on that. 

For some reason, I really want to touch some nice cool water. Looking at the closest tree, I decided that there will be water behind it. I go there, and there is a small puddle of water right next to the strunk. I use it to wash my face and enjoy the sensation. I want more water, so I pull deeper into the puddle, but  there is just a lot of mud. I take a large junk of mud and put it onto my face, and then onto my hair. I am reminded of Nnedi Okorafor´s novella Binti, where the protagonist comes from a specific Nigerian tribe that uses a specific kind of mud or clay to put it in their hair. On the tree is now a mirror, but a very dysfunctional one: While it sometimes mirrors my movements, half of the time the person in the mirror does slightly other things. I use the mirror to look at my hair, A bit later into the dream, an african person turns up and offers to dance with me for a bit.

I don't usually have dreams that are about foreign places, but the idea of "Africa right behind the corner" had been in my mind, hence the theme. I didn't travel anywhere though, I was just in an unspecified meadow, next to a nice old tree. You could say me putting mud into my hair was technically cultural appropriation of some sorts, but for me it was really just about getting a different sensation. Mud feels really nice, and I can't smear it into my hair IRL without quite some suffering consequences. ;-) Anyway, what I do in my dreams is no concern of ethics - only how and if I write about them is.

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The second thing that made me think about velocity is the experience of speed, and of rapidly changing environments. If I sit in a fast-running train, it is to be expected that things will just woosh past me, and I can't even see them properly. In a dream, this could a bit of a problem, as my mind has to come up with new scenes in a rapid succession. It can do that, but when I fly very fast, I tend to lose contact with my environment after a while, especially since no part of my body actually touches anything besides air, which tends to count as "nothing" or perhaps some sensation of wind.

One way to look at it, would be, that my experience would be similar to someone watching TV; I sit still in a chair, but what I see can be very fast. The dream ultimately is like a virtual reality, but there is no actual space I am bolting through, I just get (some of) the sensations I would have if I did move.

Another dream of today:

As I become aware of my dream-state, I am running on the street, focussing on the feeling of my feet on the ground at first, then eventually deciding on flying. As I move upward a bit, the scene I was in fades away fast, I am accelerating towards the (very beautifully coloured) horizon, while below me, treetops rush past me. At some point, there is very little sensation of actually being there, and it is more like watching a zoomquilt. I did enjoy the changing patterns of pink sky and green leaves though.

 ~

As I write this, I feel I'm more and more unhappy about the sheer number of assumptions I make about what is possible in my dreams, despite knowing from other people´s accounts, that those limits can be surpassed. There are people for whom their dream environment is so stable and unchangable that it behaves way more like a real place than a virtual reality. Why am I deconstructing my dreams to such a degree?

I want to mention that one of my side-goals for pracising lucid dreaming is to get inspiration for my fantasy worlds, in which dreams, while also deeply personal at times, can be actual places. So I'm torn between two contradicting views - one pretends to be scientific (while ignoring some data), the other one pretends to be fantastic (while sometimes being closer to actual experience).

So, where to go? I feel like over-analyzing dreams in that way does not actually help me at all. My plan was to improve my dream-control, and to do that by shredding away my misconceptions about what rules a dream has to follow. But if I'm honest, the dreams I find most interesting are not those where the dreamer is in full control, but those where the dream environment resists manipulation.

So I'd better focus on sensations (as I already did in today´s dreams!) and exploration. I got sidetracked A LOT, holy fuck.

So here's the actual points of this post:

1) There is no point in moving through dreams in a high velocity, unless experiencing velocity is the goal.

2) To travel somewhere is to assume that I am not already there, which may not be necessary at all times.

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Next up, I want to:

a) more sensations! including eating, bc eating lots of food without any concern for health is cool

b) have some actual conversations (it has been a while) like asking people who they are

For the second one to happen, I seem to need a bit more time. My dreams tend to start with me being completely alone (even if I'm in a cityscape), and other people only appear when I got distracted by some other activity. I've had complicated analytical ideas about *why* that is the case, but honestly, I might make more progress by throwing those into a dustbin for now; idk.

~

Restricting myself to writing in english is more exhausting than I thought it would be. There is no reason to do so, if I truly do this for myself and not for other people. I thought that writing in a different language than in the past 15 years would force me to think differently, but that doesn't seem to be the case overall.

Future posts will therefore be in whatever language I feel like writing at the time.