Dream Journal
July 15, 2001 @ 4 AM
I was awoken from dreams by this loud alarm-like sound being made by the freezer, and can’t resist writing down what I remember.
I was a character, not quite me, running over rocks along a beautiful river in a summery area with mountains on either side. I was being chased by dogs. The dogs were 100% thought forms, rubbery and cheating gravity as they came after me. I had created them earlier just as an experiment. Could they catch me? But the more I watched them, the more I could believe them, and a sense of urgency prevailed.
I ran into this large open cave with river water pooling in it. While it was a perfectly real cave, looking back I know with certainty that it was the Dream Station. This has been my new recurring dream place for quite some time, though it is more of a feeling and a shape than one specific place. To hide from the dogs, I considered jumping down into the water to grab two giant turtles and swim with them, or I could go into this black area. But I realized doing this would significantly “change things”. The Dream Station connects to the underworld (or the physical world), I believe. There is a straight vertical shaft between it and a more dark and solid place, and it may be related to my 4 AM underworld journeys. The time was almost exactly 4 AM when I awoke.
So it was at this point in the dream that I hear the alarm from the physical side. Suddenly I am no longer in the action, but outside the cave discussing the sound with a friend. I am now the storyteller, aware of both worlds, wondering if it’s a car alarm, or if it’s coming from the neighbor’s apartment. I even remembered that it had happened earlier in the night and stopped. So I decided to wait it out and push back to the dream side. I thought about how to attribute the sound in the dream. “Ah, I’ll attribute it to a search ray, operated by the dog-keeper to find me.” It worked — I was back in the character of the dream. But this was scary. I tried to bury myself in the soft, light sand, but the queen had found me.
I awoke to fix the fridge now since it wasn’t stopping.
The Dream Station is the concrete-like building in last year’s “Building The Atlanta Tower” dream. It’s related to the Smooth Caves, too.
Amazing, this storyteller, knowing two worlds and more, and this blind actor that believes everything it says.
The Dream Self, Waking Self, and Fragments: Let’s look at this in detail:
In my dream self focus, I set up the scene with the dogs. This scene is a rote. As seen elsewhere, my dream self considers this scene a “dream”. I project myself into it. This projection is into a character in the dream. It isn’t quite me. It doesn’t have my memory. It’s a waking self fragment. Created without context, it begins to get emotional, thinking the dogs chasing it are physically real. But the beeping pulls my attention out of the character back into my more real dream self focus with its broader, wider context. It has its own body. It’s been here all along but I was focused in the projection, like a person on a couch playing a video game. Now from the dream self focus I shift focus to the physical, to my full waking consciousness, to determine what the beeping could be. At that focus, reunited with my waking context, I make a decision to wait and hope it stops beeping on its own again. I pass that decision back to my dream self focus, where I uniquely know how to deal with the sound. I consciously redirect the sound into the dream scene along with a context-appropriate explanation of what is causing it. Now that the sound is dealt with, my attention can jump back into the character in the dream scene. I can get back to playing what is essentially my custom-built video game, where I’m playing the part of the character who is once again being chased by dogs.
This is amazing. In the dream self focus, we are the conductor of dreams. We orchestrate our dream experiences from a broader context. We are aware of when we are “dreaming” or not. We are intimately aware of the workings of the astral world. In that focus we set up scenes and situations for fun, and project ourselves into them to experience.
What we project is a self fragment; a receptive, uncritical, trusting copy of ourselves that will fully accept and believe the situation it finds itself in. The self fragment has no history, but it’s still us. Given any situation, we react as we naturally would. We don’t understand (or even question) how we got here. A self fragment is us, just as a person with amnesia still has their personality, expectations, desires, and fears. We lack only the wisdom available from a larger, broader context — including, importantly, the wisdom to know that in the larger view, we created this adventure for ourselves.
The self fragment is the embodiment of “suspension of disbelief”. It’s how we can understand stories.
Running from the dogs triggered my waking self emotionally, and it awoke into the dream with no memory of how it got there (shortened context). Typically at this point the self fragment pulls in physical life context and begins to apply physical rules & limitations. It responds as if what’s happening has physical life consequences.
At the dream self focus, I knowingly created the thought forms of dogs on a whim, to see if they could catch my character in the story. It may seem insensitive to the poor trusting self fragment who began to believe he was in danger! But I achieved my goal — drama! Why do we read books? Why do we watch movies? Drama, conflict, adventure.
Notice how the dream scene itself is a rote from the perspective of the dream self! I exit the scene to make the decision about the alarm sound, and then when that’s dealt with, I reinhabit the character — MYSELF — running from the dogs in the dream. Also consider how I describe this character as “not quite me” when referring to the self fragment. That’s the perspective from the dream self focus. It’s a limited version of me running through a rote. It has to be or it wouldn’t believe in and engage with the simulation.
Once my full waking self decided it was safe to return to sleep, I shifted focus to my dream self, where I do something my waking self knows nothing about. I knew I had to integrate the sound into the story rote so I could return to it. This worked and my attention returned to the scared fragment self within the rote, now even more scared by my dream attribution of the sound as a search ray.
Our full waking self is our focus in daily waking life and in lucid dreaming.
The MetaDreamer, then, simply describes the ability to focus back and forth from the dream self focus to the waking self focus.
I frequently go into little imaginative reveries in dreams, usually to add drama and excitement at times when I’m less engaged externally. See the section “Reveries” for examples of this. I’ll do it several times within the same dream adventure.
Weaving Sounds into the Dream: The MetaDreamer refocuses to the Waking Self to make judgements about the meaning of sounds coming from the waking world, then upon deciding it’s not important, decides how to weave them back into the plot of the dream so as to minimize their ability to interrupt the dream. Once attributed to something relevant to the dream, that sound no longer would draw me out of the dream.
The Dream Station: The elevator from the Dream Station ends at a domed auditorium in the college around The Atlanta Tower. It’s interesting that it’s an auditorium — a place where different scenes are shown and acted out — where one can exit into dreams.
Believing It: In the dream self focus, I had created this subdream rote, putting myself into a scene with dogs chasing me. But then that self began to believe it was real. This requires a break in context. A longer memory would reveal that I had created these dogs to see if they could catch me. But due to the break in continuity caused by my fear, I forget that I was responsible for creating this and that it’s not physically real. I believe I’m really in danger.
I can jump back out of the rote and reconnect with my greater context, then jump back in and I’m disconnected from it again — yet there’s always some connection. I can always choose from a higher level to pull out of the rote. Think of a rote as a bubble. When we jump in, we are just within the context of that bubble. When we jump out, we reunite with the greater context outside. Our physical lives are bubbles. The bubble is a context barrier. While we are within a rote, we disconnect from the greater continuity and absorb the context (backstory) of the rote.
The bubble of our consciousness trails out behind us in the normal waking state, with its long life context. This includes all of our memory — all the things from the past that affect and influence us. When high, our context resets again and again. That trail of continuity behind us breaks, breaks again with every change of focus, shortens our context to just right now.
Its Knowing: I don’t know how this would change things, but my dream self knew.