How to Sleep

Last night I had a dream. It wasn't a nightmare, but it was very startling and realistic. I woke up all surprised and had to focus to get back to sleep and return to the same dream. I do that often. Sometimes it results in my not sleeping as well as I should, but I get to have the most exciting dreams and I know they are dreams while I am in them. This, apparently, is called lucid dreaming.

A philosopher named Celia Green wrote the book on lucid dreaming. Green is really interested in the mind and body connection. The same year she wrote her book about lucid dreaming, she also wrote about out-of-body experiences.

While I obviously believe in lucid dreaming, I have never been totally convinced about out-of-body experiences. There just seems to be too much hocus pocus around that sort of thing, which is good for stories and all, but really?

What I find interesting about lucid dreaming is the ability to control your dreams. My twin-cousin and I learned to control our dreams as children because she was rather tormented by nightmares. My aunt showed us how to acknowledge we were dreaming when the dreams got to scary or started moving in a direction we didn't like.

In her dreams, my cousin invented a place called the Bureau of Dreams and Wishful Thinking, where she could go and file a complaint any time her dreams got out of control. I am really surprised my cousin grew up to be an artist and not a bureaucrat, but I guess that thinking up something like that has to be creative.

In my dreams, I just had a cloaked shaman, who looked like the mystical personification of death. He telepathically knew how I wanted my dreams to go and would point me in the right direction when my dreams got out of control.