03/28/03
Lucid Falling


Last night I dreamed I was following a group of people and we came out over a stairway leading down into this carpeted room. At first it was a normal stairway, and I wanted very badly to go into the room as the others were there and I was being left behind, and the room looked so colorful and happy. But then all of a sudden it was not a stairway but some kind of bar, and one VERY TALL step, so the person descending would have to grab onto the bar with their hands and do some sort of acrobatic leap in order to reach the floor.

You probably don't know this but I am absolutely TERRIFIED of heights, major acrophobia; I can't even climb a ladder and expect to come back down on my own--like a cat caught up a tree. Even standing on a surface that's a few feet high can get me nervous. It's that bad. So I hope you get the idea.

Well, in the dream, a young girl went ahead of me and made it down to the lower level just fine. A little girl! And I was quaking with fear. Me, an adult. I really, really wanted to go into that room, but I was too terror stricken to even try.

I finally reached out and put my hands on the bar, hoping to just grab onto it and test the waters, so to speak, then let go and pull back when I realized it was too high. But that didn't happen. For as soon as I grabbed on I lost balance in such a way that if I were to let go of the bar, I'd go PLUMMETING to the floor! It looked to be at least fifty feet down, GAH!! I was leaning out over this abyss, with my feet on the ledge and my hands on the bar, and I had NO way of getting down unless someone helped me (and everybody else was occupied, not noticing my presence), or unless I...well...you know.

I think I considered yelling for help, but I knew none would come.

Then I started doing something very odd.

I closed my eyes and said, "It's just a dream. I'm not afraid of heights. I can't get hurt. It's just a dream. I'm not afraid of heights. I can't get hurt. It's just a dream..."

For, all of a sudden, I KNEW this was only a dream, and if I could control it, I would not get hurt. It took a LOT of repeating--at first I was only saying this mentally, but then I started saying it aloud, as if to convince myself--and I had a few false starts. But finally, I took a breath, again told myself it was just a dream, and commanded myself to grab onto the bar and swing upwards like a gymnast. Do a few spins and such and plummet down to land on my feet. It didn't quite work out the way I planned, as, with it being only a dream, the physical sensations were not right--I remember spinning around in the air a few times in a disorderly manner, not at all controlled like a gymnast would be--but in the end, I landed on the floor, unhurt. Alive! Amazing.

I don't remember much afterwards of that pretty room, go figure. >:/ But I DO remember telling somebody that I had known it was a dream, and that was how I escaped harm and overcame my fear.

Which is what leads me to the question...what the heck WAS that? At first, I did NOT know it was a dream. It felt very real--even my fear was palpable, even while I said it was a dream. I could FEEL the squeezing feeling in my chest, the shortness of breath and such. But, while I was telling myself it was a dream, I KNEW it was a dream, at least, in the dream. I didn't know that me telling myself it was a dream was a dream in itself...does that even make sense? o_O I thought my telling myself it was a dream was REALITY, when in fact it was not. Then, once I landed again, I remembered the "dream" part, but once more, the whole thing was reality! If it had been just a dream, why would I have ended up in that room after having descended from that height? Wouldn't the room and the people in it have been a dream, too? It's like my mind entered a temporary dream state to enable me to overcome my fear, but then I ceased knowing it was a dream. I had slight lucidity at that one point--but only to an extent. I did NOT know I was actually lying on the couch sleeping with the TV on. I only knew at that ONE point that I could not be hurt if I jumped; everything else to me was real, even the landing.

I'm wracking my brain trying to figure this one out. o_O What the heck was that and why did it happen? It was almost like a dream within a dream, though it wasn't. It was more like limited lucidity within a dream, without total knowledge that the entire thing was a dream. It felt good to overcome a fear, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what happened, why, or how.

(For the record--I am not capable of lucid dreaming. Only very, very rarely will I know that something is a dream--in fact I know of only one occasion when that happened--but I can't actively change things, wake myself up, or tell myself it's just a dream and won't hurt me. I've tried getting myself to dream of certain topics by repeating key words before dozing off, but that does not work either. Which is why this dream was doubly strange for me.)



2003 Dreams
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