Anyone ever see the movie Waking Life? Well in the movie they say the way to know if you`re dreaming or not is to try to turn on a light. If you can`t do it then you know you`re dreaming. The other night I had a dream, but it seemed very realy so I couldn`t tell if I was dreaming or not. I was just in my bed watching tv and I felt a scary presence over me so I tried turning on a lamp but suddenly the light bulb dissappeared and I couldnt turn it on. So I got up slowly and tried turning a different light on, again the light bulb went away. I kept wondering if this was just a dream or not. I could literally feel the switch between my fingers. Tried again with another light, but the bulb was gone again. I then stood up on the bed and looked across the room to the huge vanity mirror and I had some sort of scary mask on. Kind of like Frank from donnie darko. Then I woke up and realized it was a dream. While I was waking up though I could start feeling my body become real again. Like I was coming back into myself. veryyyy weird? Any input?
I've never seen Waking Life, but i have had many dreams where i could, as you said, literally feel things . So, your not alone.
the only thing i would say is all those arbitrary things are just that. that and how your own subconscous sees things. light switches, the tactile feel of textures, reading numbers, all of this things CAN happen in some dreams and happen to not happen in others. you might have one dream in which you can't read numbers like on a digital clock, and another in which you can. many in which you don't notice tactile sensations or smell, and others in which you do. turning things on and off with mechanical controls is almost the same thing, except for the needle in a hay stack kind of thing that sometimes happens when you try to force anything. i think the bulbs not being there is part of this same kind of thing. of the dream world preventing without obvious direct resistence you could otherwise push against, you from arbitrarily testing whether you were in that dream world or this one. but since you persisted in pushing against its resistence to being proven, in a sense it gave itself away by alowing/causing you to wake up when/after you did. i personaly think this whole buisiness of proving to yourself that you're dreaming when you are, instead of merely accepting the dream world as a kind of parallel universe where teleporting works and physics and proximity work differently then they do in our waking one, is really kind of pointless. dreams are a different kind of reality. not more. not less. just "other". and other-ness is something we need, just as much as we may also need, if indeed we do, the familiar landmarks of wakefulness. =^^= .../\...
i think it's sweet that the lightswitch thing worked in your dream. i would have to say that dreams are certainly less of a reality than our "waking life.^^^^ the trick is to realize you're dreaming before you wake up. that way you can control your dreams and really have fun with them.
I would think that the scary presence and the Donnie Darko mask are linked, that it means that you may be tempted to go along a dark path. Your inability to turn on a light bulb may indicate your powerlessness to affect change for the better, the inability to extricate yourself from this situation once you get involved. Your feeling as if 'you were coming back into the body' probably means that you had an out-of-body type experience. Here's the kicker: while you were out gallavanting in the spiritual universe you left your body unprotected. Other spirits could have been harming it. Which is where you could have felt a scarey presence.
Oh jeez dont tell me that! I do this a lot but not on purpose. How can I protect myself????? Now I`m worried.
waking life is an amazing movie. i've only had one dream where i tried the lightswitch thing...i remember, i flicked it once and the light flickered, but it wouldn't turn on after that. i knew i was dreaming after that, but i couldn't think of what i wanted to do. haha
in my dreaming experience, realizing i'm dreaming, or even thinking of it in that terms, has NOTHING to do with being able to influence what goes on in them. it's just a different universe in which some things work a little differently then the one we're awaike in. including the interaction of physics and will. otherwise the one is every bit as experientialy 'real' as the other. =^^= .../\...
does this mean you can control your dreams, even when you know you're not dreaming? that's pretty sweet. for me, i have to know that i'm dreaming in order to control my dreams. or else i just go along with it, not even realizing i'm in another world. if i interpreted it wrong, feel free to correct me.
