I get inside the tank and shut the door. I’m in pitch blackness and I’m wearing earplugs – this is strange already! I move to lie down and get comfortable. The water truly does keep me afloat. However, my neck doesn’t feel very secure so I get out of the tank to grab this bubble wrap material that they told me I could use to give my neck some padding.

I get back inside and all this movement causes some water to drip into my eye. The water is highly concentrated with salt, and it burns like hell.

I’m trying to get comfortable now with my neck being padded, but I’m having trouble catching my breath. Then I get salt in my left nostril, and it burns, and then – dammit! – now somehow water has dripped into my other eye, and it’s burning, too. This would be comical if it wasn’t for the pain!

The burning fades quickly, but I lie there for the next 30 minutes in a constant struggle to breathe and relax. It never happens, and I am never able to embrace the floatation tank experience.

It’s too warm in here and there is no air flow. The “fan” is so faint I could not even tell it was on until I rotated myself to be directly underneath it.

With my ears underwater and having earplugs in, it’s like it’s just me and my breath in here. This is bad news because it puts way too much focus on trying to breathe, and all this just exasperates the problem.

I decide to open the door to let in some fresh air.

This helps but I still can’t breathe easily.

With the door open, light is now coming in. This is distracting so I get out of the tank to turn off the light.

At this point, having not been able to relax or easily breathe the whole time, and then having to get out of the tank real quick to turn off the light – yes, I’m very frustrated! I’ve not enjoyed any of this so far at all.

The remaining time was much the same, and I never was able to experience the tank in the way it should be.

A hugely disapppointing experience.

I was supposed to do 90 minutes, but I left the tank early because I was so uncomfortable.

I felt bad having to tell the owner, a very kind woman with lots of energy – and the beauty of someone half her age – that my experience was unpleasant. She suggested that my breathing problem it’s due to some alignment with my spine, since it manifests only when I lie straight down on my back. Funny I had never really thought of this, I wonder if it’s true?

Amazingly, instead of charging me, she instead offered me a second session, free of charge. I’d very much like to take up her offer but I fear it will be much of the same – I simply won’t be able to breathe the whole time.

I’ve had problems breathing on and off for the last 4 years. When I lie down, I often can’t breathe through my nose, and this results in a cycle of trying to catch my breath, being to breathe good temporarily, and then trying to catch my breath again, and so on. When this was keeping me up for hours at night, I started using that nostril spray that clears your sinuses up.

I’ve just realized now as I type this that I should be able to do the same thing right before going in the tank and maybe then I can have a real tank experience.

On the plus side, there were a few brief seconds where I could understand the potential for how neat this could be, because your body really does float and it takes absolutely no effort. After doing this for some time, the weight of the body is so displaced and different than normal, it’s a really odd sensation. If I could have breathed and relaxed in total darkness in this state, it would have been very cool.But today was really not what I was hoping for at all and I’m honestly still kinda pissed off about it.

Grr!

Dark Days Ahead by Perry McKenna

Few readers of this blog know this, but I am going through a divorce right now. In fact, I am 3 months separated.

It would suffice to say this is a pretty terrible period of my life.  The upheaval this has caused in my day to day living is one reason why my work on Dreaming Life has been so spotty for most of 2008.

What I find interesting and want to talk about in this article is how I can see reflections of my marriage and divorce in my dreams.

…

I got married 4 years ago last month.

Around that time, and for many months, I had dream after dream of fighting off sexual encounters with women.

All the dreams were of the same theme: a woman trying to seduce me or otherwise become intimate with me, and my struggle against it.

In most of the dreams, I would not do anything sexual with the woman. Sometimes I would.

These were weird dreams & I often felt guilty about having them. Here I was just recently married, and I’m having dream after dream about trying not to have sex with other women!

I know these dreams were about my (unconscious) anxiety of being committed to one woman for the rest of my life. Having had a step-father who had an affair and seeing first hand the horrors this brought on to the family, I believe my psyche had a fear of myself somehow doing the same thing.

Even though I very often told my wife about my dreams, I never mentioned these dreams to her.

After some months, they faded away & I didn’t think about them anymore.

…

Fast forward a few years, and you can see from my dream journal some crazy shit.

In March of 2007, after a gut-wrenching experience of seeing my wife performing tango for the first time, a hobby that came to be one of the biggest points of tension in our relationship, I had the following dream, as noted in my dream journal:

Some horrible dream with <my stepdad>  in it…
He’s sitting on the couch, and he gets up, and I’m trying to push him back
He suggests/threatens that maybe he should go see her/touch her/in some way interact with <my wife>, and I’m forcibly trying to push him back

This is the same step-father who had an affair.

In this dream he represents what I saw her dancing as; a threat to our marriage. And here I am struggling between my wife and my step-father, trying to push him away, and he keeps fighting to get at her.

…

The weeks after we physically moved out from living together,  I have many emotional dreams on change, fear, feeling suffocated, and so on.

Here’s a snippet from June 19th, 2008:

I’m outside and suddenly there’s a enormous force in the atmosphere, pulling everyone and everything out, uprooting them. I realize it’s the end of the world -  this is it, some natural disaster, global warning, something – and I’m going to die.

I try to think to myself of something important, of something to hold on to while/if I’m going to die, and I tell l myself “I love <my wife>.”

Having a dream about the end of the world is bad enough, but the end of this dream was just… brutal.

I woke up and felt terrible. What was this all about? Holding onto my feelings for my wife when everything is changing? It was incredibly painful.

The next week on June 24, in my journal I find a summary of a different dream as:

>intense dream – unable to move, captive, going to die.

And so on.
…

While we were still together, I recall a dream of drowning and trying my hardest to keep my head above the water. (Which I did!)

Long before this, there was this dream of beautiful cinematic quality, again touching on the end of the world theme. It’s our final moment, and we know this. We hold each other tightly, exchanging a final  “I love you.” Then we die together, arm in arm, as we (and the world) burn up in ashes.

…

And now in the present, where I am struggling with just going to work and staying afloat and deciding what to do with myself and my life, it’s interesting to see how this manifests in my dreams.

Hours ago I was in a different world, one in which I experienced many things such as being paralyzed by fear and unable to move or make a decision, with dreams of humiliation, fighting, and belittlement.

It’s no coincidence that I had these dreams last night after an evening of some rough emotional reflection my life.

…. …. …..

In summary:

Well, there is no grand summary, or happy ending to this story. Life is rough.

But like my Grandma said to me recently:  this too shall pass.

Photo by Perry McKenna.

She Left The Door Open by HKD

This experience was far more fulfilling than any other lucid dream I’d ever had. I’ve never had a dream anywhere near this long, with this much control, with so many different dream characters, with so many different dreamscapes and experiences, and all of it with so much clarity of mind.

It was incredibly long. I estimated, while still dreaming, that about an hour had passed.

I became lucid after noticing my face itched strangely and felt funny; I did a reality test, and realized I was actually dreaming. Before I went to bed, I mentally set the intention that I would have a lucid dream.

Upon waking, I was able to recall up to 13 different sequences or “dream scenes.” Here are the more interesting details from the dream:

• I sent myself two emails from within the dream. I’m not sure why – I didn’t ever think it would work, but maybe it just seemed fun to do. It wasn’t all that hard to type, although I do recall the typo I made on the second email, where all I wrote was “deram tsest” and hit send. Later in the dream, I stumbled upon a conversation with others who were discussing this idea of emailing yourself from a dream. I told them I had actually already done this and they got all excited, but I tried to explain it’s not going to work because it was just dream computer, and dream internet!

• Flying! Oh my god, I’ve never flown so well in a dream. For a moment, I had a hard getting off the ground but I thought about the advice I got from visitors to the blog – basically, don’t try so hard! – and it worked. I flew through the sky at the treetops. I purposely allowed my skin to graze the leaves, and I vividly recall the feeling of the leaves as they brushed against my skin. I used the trees as a sort of “mental grounding” to propel myself through the air, from one tree to the other. It was fantastic.

• Discussing with another dream character the idea of awareness in a dream. Where is this awareness? This isn’t my hand, this isn’t my body… where is this all coming from? I felt that the only “real” part of my dream body was my brain, which was connected to my real brain, sleeping on the bed. This is some shady thinking, as my dreaming brain is no more real than anything else in the dream. The question remains though, what is it that’s aware in the dream? Where’s that point of awareness coming from?

• Laughing with my wife after purposely punching a wall and then shying away from purposely causing pain. I thought I would welcome dream pain because I’m simply curious to see how the dreaming mind makes everything so real. I thought about Mad Hatters post on dream pain and laughed – I didn’t want to feel pain, even if I knew it was only “dream pain”!! When you’re feeling it, dreaming or not, it feels real. This was a really interesting moment for me in the dream. I also recall looking at my wife, smiling and laughing at the situation because I knew she was just a dream character.

• Getting into a group conversation about Hardline because a dream character asked me to explain it. Before getting into I thought, “I can’t believe I’m getting into this in a dream…”

• Constant reality tests. I would put my arm into the wall all the way up to my elbow. I was able to do this to a mirror too, which was much harder to do than a wall. In 2 parts of the dream, other characters were doing the reality tests with me. I can easily recall the feeling of having my arm submerged into the wall. It reminds me of the feeling of having my arm submerged into water. The next day I kept looking at the walls at work, thinking of this experience. I also merged my entire body with the structure of the house, moved upwards through the ceiling and onto the roof, and mentally collapsed the house together, with the intention of adding onto it.

• INCREASE LUCIDITY NOW. I shouted this a few times in the dream when I felt the clarity of the dreamscape fading. I tried this before in a lucid dream with no success but this time it worked. I would shout “Increase Lucidity NOW!”, and maybe punch a wall at the same time, and things would snap back into focus.

• Discussing with 2 friends within the dream how much time had passed so far and that maybe it was time for me to wake up. We came to the conclusion that about an hour had passed, and that it was time for me to get up. I flew through the air and passed a building, emailed myself one more time from the side of the building (strange, I know), and then promptly woke up.

…

Normally, if I have a lucid dream it’s the first thing I talk about upon waking up.

But this time, the experience was so great that I kept it to myself until that evening. When I talk my wife about it, who is at best only vaguely intrigued by lucid dreams, she asked me “What’s the reason for lucid dreaming? What’s the point of it?”

Such a simple question, but I struggled to answer it! I couldn’t really express my reasons to her at the time.

Naturally, this got me to thinking about why I want to have lucid dreams and what’s the point of it for me. Later this week I’ll be posting my thoughts on the answer to this question.

“I have tingles now, like I took too much B6.”
- Last entry into the dream journal before going back to bed

Photo by H. Hoppdelaney.

Vitamin B6 Dream Experiments

Summary: Experimenting with doses between 150-400 MG over the course of 5 nights, I discovered that taking B6 in doses between 200-400 MG had an obvious effect on my dreams. They became aggressive, odd, vivid, often mean-spirited and disturbing. Only once did I experience a lucid dream.

Night One: 150 MG B6

I had really bad dreams, but I’m skeptical to contribute this to the B6.

Night Two: 200 MG B6

No discernable effects. I took the pills 2 hours before falling asleep and I believe this is why they had no effect.

Night Three: 200 MG B6

Took my B6 pills immediately before falling asleep this time, and I woke up just two hours after falling asleep with a dream fresh in my mind. I immediately typed up everything still lurking in memory from the dream world. My dreams were very detailed, odd, and unfortunately had no element of lucidity in them, except in the most round-about of ways as noted below.

“I’m running right on Western Boulevard. It’s night time. I’ve got blonde hair – it’s not me, it’s some really cheesy guy. It’s a movie actually. I’m doing all sorts of commando shit. A cop car comes out real quick, first turning away from me and then changing directions because they’re chasing after me. I’m jumping and hiding in trees. They’ve fired missiles at me and I’m able to jump around and dodge from them. The irony is that they end up striking the nuclear material I was trying to destroy. As if this is more of an interactive action movie than a dream, a crazy theme song is now playing. I say some poetically dorky statement ton how I came to destroy these nuclear weapons but the government ended up and destroying their own nuclear weapons in the pursuit of me. Insane rings of fire are wrapping out around me everywhere. These rings of fire (branches too? ) were spiraling up and wrapping around all over the place, with me jumping around them and on them, from one to another… the angle I’m seeing all of was like an action movie with brilliant graphics, like a badass comic book. I’m spiraling up & up and & up. If you’re quick and you’re watching the movie you’re able to jump all in the trees with all the fire wrapping around, and stay with him. At first I can do it but then it gets too fast.”

This part of the dream was particularly vivid. I cannot express how brilliant these rings of fire were and what it was like to be dreaming around them and through them. If only I could have become lucid!
Earlier parts of the dream involved my wife and I being involved in prostitution, pimping and drug dealing. This is the quasi-lucid element of the dream. I dreamt of how my dream was so messed up, and I try to get other people in my dream who seem upset by the dream content to write down their knowledge of the dream so I can compare notes and see if they really know what I dreamt. I wrote:

“Other people know how fucked up the dream I just had was. I try to get them to write it down before telling me, that way we can compare notes. I stress locations -don’t tell me anything now, just write down location and details – hoping that the gutter on Western and Avent Ferry would come up.”

Night Four: 300 MG B6

I know I had three specific dreams, but I only remembered one dream well enough to write it down. This dream was no fun at all. It shared the same theme of my dreams from the first night; betrayal, cheating, jealously. Probably planted by an email conversation I’ve been having with a friend on a related subject.

Night Five: 400 MG B6

I’ve read that around 1000 MG, B6 becomes toxic to the body. At less than half that I experienced chills and tingles throughout my body and woke up with a stomach ache. Because of this I’m not sure if this is a healthy experiment for me to continue.

This is unfortunate, because last night I experienced by far the strangest and most fantastic of dreams out of all these nights. This includes the first lucid dream experienced on B6, of which I wrote the following:

“I had a lucid dream when I first went to bed. By the end, it was quite scary actually. I just remember going to the bathroom in the dream and crossing a mirror and knowing I’m dreaming at this point. I try to breathe firmly and slowly to calm myself down in the dream. I can feel myself breathing in both bodies. I can’t really see myself too good in the mirror. I don’t’ understand the order of what happened next, but somewhere, I either felt a sense of sleep paralysis or imagined would it could feel like and this freaked me out, causing me to wake up. It seemed I really was for a moment in some sort of in between zone where my chest felt paralyzed. I believe this happened because before I went to bed I was reading about an experience with sleep paralysis on the dreamviews.com message board.”

The rest of what I remember is largely one big crazy dream buffered with very scary, unpleasant and for a moment, quite magical feelings, such as the quantum physics elevator. Most of the dreams disturbing aspects related to killing animals that would then split into two animals, constantly regenerated themselves.

I wrote this about it at 1:30 AM, just two hours after I went to bed:

“I’m breaking up my dog Malcolm into two. I do not know why, but it needed to be done – this wasn’t an act of hate or cruelty. I’ve crushed him and he’s broken. I’m splitting him up, CRUNCH, pounding on him, putting my weight on him to crush him, and it’s like he won’t die. He keeps popping back into this little devil of an animal. This never really looked like Malcolm.

There’s this kitten that I’m trying to crush too – except this one comes back perfectly cute and small, with short gray fur nice to the touch. I’ve killed him over and over and every time he just regenerates – and once he comes back, I touch him and his head just fucking falls right off like it’s nothing. I do this a handful of times.

We’re really disgusted and frustrated; we don’t understand how they’re divisible and keep splitting up and regenerating. I’m outside and this one animal shoots out – it was particularly disgusting, horrid, and I believe Iryna called for me to take care of it. She/this woman and another are outside, it’s some sort of European-esque courtyard, with an elevator in the corner.”

Before going to bed I was reading theories on body/mind dualism, and materialism. The references to Aristotle’s thoughts on being able to conceive of the body as divisible but not the mind as divisible (thus the mind can exist without the body, he thought) crept up in this dream in the form of dead or dying animals dividing their bodies into two separate beings. Crazy!

At this point I must have entered the elevator which was taking me to work, because this is what I remember next:

“In the elevator it’s like a different world. The experience is very positive. Quantum physics has everything in two states at once. I’m tall and short. I can see a crazy reflection of myself in the walls. Erv is in there – I look at him and flex my body while making a face and joking around that he’s a brick wall because he’s so buff and strong. Malinda and I are saying this is what makes the job cool – cool stuff like this. I’m telling her how quantum physics allows for something to be in two physical states at once – like two different sides of the same coin – and then these two sides follow a different timeline, separately, but at the same they’re not separate. She’s saying how stuff like this amazes her but just loses her, however it’s parts of the job like this that are just so cool.”

I then get off the elevator and pass up a sushi lunch on the way to my desk to see what I have to do today. My work place isn’t the office building is truly is in real life – it’s more like a grocery store. Before I get to my desk I realize I don’t work here anymore, and I find it incredulous that I showed up and even interacted with some of my coworkers in the elevator and no one remembered that last week was my last day! (Which is true – I quit last week to start a new job this week.)

The last dream I remember – instead of writing it down in the middle of the night, I lazily – dammit! – continued back to sleep and wrote down only a few details upon waking, with the feeling that I really missed something big and important. The dream came to me with the title of ‘The Telepathic Universe’, most definitely a reference to the book I’ve recently read called The Dreaming Universe. The most compelling memory involves going through a looped sequence of events in which I’m fighting and attacking and pursuing some goal. The details changed every time but the overall structure of the loop was the same.

“An elevator door would open and I wouldn’t know what was coming out – it was a woman, and once I believe it was a lizard, and now I’m having images of men with bug heads – and as soon as the doors open I charged in and killed them. They disappear simply by my striking them. My present was then a circular block that opened with keys inside them, which I’d use to move on to the next thing. The keys were large and ancient looking, almost like novelty keys or keys you’d see in a videogame.

I cannot escape this feeling that there was much more to this dream and a very real reason why I awoke with this thought of ‘the telepathic universe’ in my mind. Could it be that each loop represented a sort of parallel universe and the keys connected them all? Oh if only I could remember!

Final Thoughts…

It blows my mind that two nights I awoke just two hours after taking the B6 and falling asleep having experienced very vivid dreams. I thought the way REM worked wouldn’t allow for such dreams to occur so early in the stages of sleep. What exactly then does B6 do to the brain and to the natural structure of REM occurrences?

For those who are able to easily gain lucidity when after taking it – congratulations, I envy you. This didn’t work for me, except for once, at a dose that I have serious considerations of its safety after repeated usage. I’ve read of many people who experience a lucid dream the first time they take a high dose of B6 – this is great! Yet I wonder what role the expectations placed on B6 has in experiencing a lucid dream. Can high doses of this vitamin inherently cause lucid dreams- and if so, what is it about B6 and the brain that causes this to happen? OR is there a placebo effect involved here? Could it be that what creates the lucid dream is not the B6 but the expectation that B6 is going to cause a lucid dream?

    Photo by Jason Rogers.