In this dream, I’m having a plane crash.
I’m sitting in the full lotus position, dropping through space, alone. It’s cold and dark, windy and noisy. I’m confused at first, but then I get it. Someone else is going to have the crash. I just happen to be outside the plane, falling. I gather that my death is imminent, and somehow I know that I’m falling toward the sea. At first I feel terrible regret about all I’m going to miss in this life—my wife, my kids, my grandchildren. Then, after a few thousand feet of freefall, comes resignation, acceptance. I picture the eventual search detail looking for me. And suddenly, in this dream, I’m glad I wore my new long-sleeve jersey from the Gap. It’s bright. It makes me easier to see, in parking lots, for example.
I picture my wife in a search plane, its engines droning, a headset clamped to her ears, binoculars pressed to her face, as she surveys thousands of square miles of desolate ocean.
A uniformed guy sitting next to her says, “What was he wearing?”
“His new shirt from Gap,” she says.
“What color?”
“Kind of a . . . cerulean,” she says.
Uniformed guy nods, thinks, gives up. “Just gimme a color,” he says.
My wife the color theorist explains that it’s a kind of blue, a hue, really, somewhere between pure blue and cyan. She says that I looked good in it (choking up when she says this), that I was easily recognizable, in parking lots, for example.
Crap, I think. Blue! They’ll never find me now, lost in the blue, blue sea.
And then the dream fades to black. I don’t hit the sea.
I don’t die.
Experts say you don’t die if your dream fall is completed. I’ll have to take them at their word. I’ve never actually finished the fall. I’ve never hit the sidewalk after falling from a tall building. I’ve never crashed into the desert in a poof of dust, Wile E. Coyote–like, after falling from a cliff. Even when, barely asleep, I stub my toe or fall off a bicycle or slip on a patch of ice, triggering that annoying hypnagogic jerk that wakes us up, I never totally fall. I don’t skin a knee or bump my face. Is there pain in dreams? I don’t recall feeling pain in a dream. Is there death? All those reports of seemingly healthy people who die in their sleep—you start to wonder. Who’s to say they didn’t dream-fall to their dream- and actual death? There’s no test for that.
Experts also say a person is likely to have a falling dream a half a dozen times or so in a lifetime. Here’s a list, courtesy of those who study dreams, of the most common recurring dream themes: falling, flying, losing your teeth; being chased or naked or late; water dreams; test dreams.
Everyone must have their own list of recurring dreams. I have a recurring house-filling-up-with-water dream. Usually it’s a house on a hillside. It’s someone else’s house; nevertheless I feel a strong sense of responsibility and desperation in the dream as I slosh from room to room, eventually escaping out the back door onto a veranda, where water reaches my waist.
There’s the recurring airport/travel dream. I’ve missed my flight, the airport morphs into a foreign city I vaguely recognize. I feel like I should know my way around as I wander from room to room, from street to street, invariably at night. It all looks familiar, in an Escher-like way, as if I’m in a dreamscape I’ve crossed in the past, yet I am hopelessly lost. Then there’s the sitting-on-the-toilet-in-the-driveway dream, and, inexplicably (but what’s truly explicable in a dream?) the recurring Jimmy Carter dream.
The first time I dreamed about Jimmy Carter, he had been out of office for years. In the dream I was in my hometown, at a party at the Coy house, on the corner of Fifth and Church Streets. It was a summer night. There was a volleyball net in the backyard, though I do not remember the Coy family as volleyball enthusiasts. No one was playing volleyball in the dream. I was standing outside, swatting mosquitos, probably looking for the beer keg, when Jimmy Carter walked around the corner of the house and across the backyard. He walked right past me.
“Hello, Mr. President,” I said.
He looked up and nodded at me. He didn’t answer.
In later dreams of Carter, when I have greeted him, always with the same, “Hello, Mr. President,” he still doesn’t answer, even though I feel like we’re kind of getting to know each other.
Now that I think of it, it seems like no one talks to me in my dreams. I talk to them. I greet them, I ask them questions, sometimes I beseech them. No one answers. I guess they don’t know what to say.
The problem with dreams, Richard Francis Kuhns has pointed out, is it’s hard to get out of them. “Dream constitutes an inescapable story,” Kuhns says, “which must be attended to. As the dream is dreamt the dreamer cannot be distracted from the dream as one might be in listening to a story that is read or spoken out loud.” You can’t change the channel; you can’t even lower the volume. You can’t ignore a dream that’s happening to you. You’re trapped in it.
A few weeks ago, my wife had a minor episode of night terror,1 crying out in her sleep. When he was little, my son went through a phase of night terrors. We would hear moans and muffled screams in the dead of night. When it happens, you have the uncanny feeling the person you know and love is far from you, unreachable, almost someone else, as if possessed. Even waking them, you can’t quite get to them. And for a while they can’t get back to you.
A loved one’s night terror is your family’s own sci-fi or horror show, a disquieting, homey mystery.
On the other hand, I tend more toward night humors, find myself waking up thinking, What was that? And: How do I go back?
Sometimes we know we are dreaming. We’re in it, the way Kuhns has it, but we know we’re in it. We have distance, perspective. But no control. In dream literature this state is referred to as “lucid dreaming.” The term was coined by a Dutch psychiatrist named Frederik van Eeden. The definitive text on lucid dreaming seems to be Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys’s Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger: Observations pratiques (Dreams and the Ways to Direct Them: Practical Observations, 1867). It sounds like an instruction manual. Those who develop skill at lucid dreaming are called oneironauts.
I probably won’t read Denys’s guide.
The Lucidity Institute offers a course in lucid dreaming. On the Institute website we are told, “The two essentials to learning lucid dreaming are motivation and effort.” That sounds like work.
I don’t want to become a oneironaut. For one thing, it’s an ugly word. For another, what if becoming a oneironaut diminished the dream, undermining the element of surprise? Even my recurring dreams are not re-runs. I want to keep them that way.
1 I prefer the term night terror to “nightmare” because the latter seems needlessly sexist. (Nightmare, according to Oxford Living Dictionaries: “Middle English denoting a female evil spirit thought to lie upon and suffocate sleepers: from night + Old English mære ‘incubus.’”)