reality testing

1.

A few weeks ago, one of the children complained of having bad dreams. One night, when he couldn’t fall asleep, I told him: If the thought arises that you might have a bad dream, then remind yourself, the bad dream is just your mind working something out. You can turn around and face the monster. You can ask the dream for a gift. If you give yourself these reminders when you are awake, then you are more likely to recognize your dream as a dream when you are dreaming it.

Insofar as this advice is sound, it is based on Why We Dream by Alice Robb. Insofar as it is unsound, it is based on one or more books on interpreting dreams that I checked out of the local library when I was in high school.

But perhaps not entirely unsound. As a teen I actually did once ask a nightmare for a gift. At the time, I frequently suffered episodes of sleep paralysis, and when during an afternoon nap the familiar terror clutched my limbs and weighed down my chest, I recognized the nightmare as a dream. I asked the dream for a gift and dissolved in bliss like sunlight before I woke up.

2.

Why do we dream without recognizing that we are dreaming? One might think that it should seem obvious that we are dreaming the moment we perceive that we are flying or a monster is chasing us or the regular order of things is otherwise unsettled or awry. But people who practice lucid dreaming work hard to do so, constantly subjecting their perceptions during both waking hours and sleeping hours to reality testing. “Effective reality tests entail reorienting yourself in the world, cultivating a skeptical outlook toward your environment,” writes Robb:

Is everything as it should be? Look for clues that your surroundings might not be real. Inspect your hands: Does each one have the usual number of fingers? Check the clock, and check it again: Has a reasonable amount of time elapsed? Find a shiny surface: Are you reflected back as you really are, or are you distorted, as though you’re looking in a funhouse mirror? Jump up in the air: Do you drop back to the ground, or have you suddenly acquired the ability to fly? The dream world is constantly in flux; check whether your environment is stable. Exit a scene and then return to it. Are you in a different room? Find a piece of text—the spine of a book, a word on a bracelet, an email—look away from it, and then look back. If you’re in a dream, the words are likely to have changed by the second inspection.

All this effort sounds exhausting. Imagine organizing so much of my attention around something as vaporous as dreams.

3.

The reality of my dreams isn’t so different from the reality of my waking life—or so it seems, at least, from the dreams I remember, in which, as in waking life, I find myself struggling to carry too much or rushing to get somewhere on time.

What sort of reality testing could help me distinguish between a panicked scramble in a dream and one in waking life, other than, as happened in a dream one recent morning, having my mother, who died more than half my lifetime ago, show up to help me?

In the dream I was struggling to pack up my things after an event, and I was terribly late to get wherever I was going next. My mother had come to pick me up and after waiting for some time outside in her car, she came in to find me. I looked her in the face then as I have not done in years, and I told her that I had no idea anymore what time it was. Neither angry nor disappointed with me, she just helped me to pick up my things and carry them out to the car.

If dreams are indeed the manifestation of a part of the self working something out, as I told my child, then I want to know what I was working out in this dream.

4.

In the past week, we’ve been staying on the shore of our beloved lake in New Hampshire, with a view to the White Mountains in the north, which have always seemed to me to be sleeping giants possibly dreaming us. Here the night itself is a dreamscape—so much darker than in the city, and so much louder, too, with a chorus of frogs and bugs whose names I don’t know. Here it seems possible that dreams are not things that unfold within one’s skull but things that unfurl in all directions.

5.

When we’re not here, I dream about here all the time. Another one of my recurring nightmares is that we are here but packing up to leave, and I realize that the whole time we were here, I missed actually being here—my mind elsewhere, fretting about work, or school, or other obligations.

Now when we are here, I practice what is more or less another kind of reality testing, asking myself several times each day, Am I really here? Because only what we give our attention to is what is truly real. In this way, waking life can be as vaporous as our dreams.