My First Lucid Dream
I just woke up from my first lucid dreaming experience. In my dream I was being driven around a town. I looked out the window at various things, and I saw a familiar building with a familiar gate and two driveways. It reminded me of a local fire station, but it was something else. Also, I knew that the building did not look the way it does today in 2019. It looked like it did many years ago. This is when I realized that I was in the past.
It suddenly dawned on me that this was a great opportunity to take pictures of all the buildings, so that later I could compare them to how they appear now. And that’s when I was struck by the notion that I had time-travelled somehow.
Now, in real life I don’t believe in time travel. I think it’s impossible. So this conflict between my real belief and my dream experience possibly helped shift my mind into the lucid dreaming state. I suspect it directed my attention to the thought that I must be dreaming.
Back to my dream. My focus changed to a passenger sitting next to me in the back seat of the car. It was a young Robert Redford, and he was talking to me. But I wasn’t interested in his words. I was overwhelmed by how realistic he seemed. Suddenly I was impressed by how everything looked crystal clear and present, like actual reality. I was having these thoughts in my dream: that the colors, for example, were more vivid than any other dream I’d ever had before. It was exactly like reality. And that’s what finally broke the spell. I became certain and fully aware that I was dreaming.
It was somewhat shocking at first. I kept telling myself excitedly, “I’m dreaming! I’m dreaming!” But I didn’t wake up. Eventually another thought came to me, “What should I do?” And so I focused on what I should do.
In real life I’ve researched lucid dreaming, because I’m working on my views of consciousness and free will. Lucid dreamers have told me that it’s a learned skill. Anyone can do it. So occasionally, over a year now, I’ve been giving myself standing orders while awake: to check my reality when I experience something that seems weird or impossible, and to give myself commands once I realize I’m dreaming. I tell myself that I should try to fly like Superman.
Once I realized that I was dreaming, and that I could do whatever I wanted, Robert Redford dematerialized and floated in air like a ghost. The car passed through him. He then rematerialized and landed on the street outside, where he stood watching me while the car kept going. It was like that scene with the twins in The Matrix Reloaded, only with Robert Redford.
By now I had snapped out of my initial confusion and excitement, and I was thinking that I should try to fly. I began tapping on the backrest of the front seats, repeating, “Stop the car! Let me out!” It was an older car with the bench seating up front. I didn’t even look at the driver. I don’t know who was driving me around town or why. My attention was concentrated out the windows.
We were in the town where I grew up. I recognized the intersection and knew the street names. To my right the city park looked the way it did in the 1980s. To my left was the Carl’s Jr. restaurant. Tall trees lined the street. I noticed that the car had stopped, and I got out.
I walked into the intersection. No other cars or people were around. Lifting up my gaze, bits of deep blue sky could be seen in the distance through low-hanging scattered white clouds. Tree tops filled the lower periphery of my vision. I raised both arms like Superman, and summoning all my willpower, I ordered myself to fly. “Fly! Fly!” was my only thought.
At first it didn’t seem like anything was happening. I kept willing and ordering. Then I realized that I was indeed off the ground, but I didn’t want to look down and break concentration. I rose slowly. There was a little fear of losing control, but not much. Mostly it felt good, like I was in command.
As I flew higher and developed confidence in my new ability, I tried to level out with the ground, but I only achieved an angle of roughly 45 degrees. Still moving slowly, I glanced downward. The town was maybe a hundred or two hundred feet below. Quickly looking back up, I continued to focus on flying higher.
I looked at the local mountains, which were a few miles away to the north. Only sections of the broad range could be seen through the scattered clouds. Flying higher and higher at an angle, passing between the wispy, white masses, like in a movie, I headed up toward the blue expanse. Then I started wondering how high up I should go, and that’s when the spell broke, and at last I woke up.
For a couple seconds I was disappointed that the lucid dream had ended, but then I was just extremely happy that it had happened, and that I could finally check off “lucid dreaming” on my bucket list. I immediately made a voice recording of the experience, while it was still fresh in my mind.
I consider my lucid dream to be a transformative experience. Before it I had never been detached and self-aware of an ongoing dream state. I had always been fully immersed until wakefulness, and so I had never been in volitional control of a dream. To me, this lucid dream represents a new state of consciousness, in which the dream, itself, became an object of my volitional awareness. It became a graspable thing within my control, like any other thing or object in reality. Just as I can observe and manipulate a rock by focusing and willing my hand to move, I have now seen and manipulated a dream–by focusing and willing my mind to move. I have spent many decades directing my mind while awake. Hopefully I’ll now have similar success while asleep.
I thank SL and KP for your replies in this thread. They helped a lot.