DREAM MEMORY:
Remembering The Endless Time of Sleep
DREAM MEMORY
Remembering within a dream is a complex process and it is one of my favourite aspects of exploring dream worlds. I would hypothesise that the memory faculties employed during sleep, tap into an ancestral mode of remembering and hint at an earlier experience of memory, consciousness and perception of reality.
When I actively remember in a dream — I feel as though I am experiencing vast networks of alternate and intersecting realities, I’m somehow on the brink of this tangibly infinite web of recollection and there is an associated feeling which I would liken to the sensation of déjà vu, or when a name is on the ‘tip-of-my-tongue’ — it is palpable. The déjà vu sensation is often a precursor to full lucidity. As my mind goes through the process of recollection — I become more and more aware of myself within the dream.
Visual memory games and active recollection when awake can be very beneficial to enhance these abilities, visual re-imagining with eyes closed of already dreamed dreams, or real life adventures and experiences help enormously in developing visual imagery powers. Reading novels, writing diaries and stories and most especially keeping a detailed dream journal are vital for the powers of the imagination.
LUCID INTEGRITY
In a lucid dream experience, the richness and clarity of any given dream scene can feel overwhelming, this is often why people jolt themselves out of sleep, and why many lucid dreamers begin their journey as children, having very real-feeling nightmares. The intensity of this ‘realness’ is exciting — and it seems to signal powerfully to the self-aware aspect of ourselves. If dreamers can learn to instead give their conscious energy to the dream scene as it unfolds before them, they notice that their perception of this reality is ‘expanded’.
There are a variety of techniques that I use to aid this — within the dream I will hold my eyelids open and drink in the dream scene, sometimes I will spin my dream body, concentrating all my powers of mind into the dream reality, sometimes it helps to hold on loosely to the dream, with a sort of soft-focus, until the waking mind has returned to a dreaming equilibrium.
TIME-SENSE
Time does not necessarily appear to move more slowly in the lucid dream realm, but it does seem to move more ‘luxuriously’. Time moves in relation to the other elements within the dream scene. Dream researchers have discovered in a physiological dream tracking study, that digitally generated ‘avatars’ reconstructed using EMG (electromyography) data, show a significant slow motion effect (University of Texas at Austin’s Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, 2017, Daniel Oldis). Interestingly, participants in these sleep studies did not report experiencing slow motion effects in the dreams however. Maybe these are similar to the time expanding effects that psychedelics produce.
My personal intuition about the lucid dream slow-motion phenomenon is this — As we consciously inhabit and are actively generating every element within the dream scene, our psychic energy is distributed evenly and not limited to the POV of our own individual character within a scene. So we have a sort of omnipotent presence within this world of our own creation. I certainly have experienced simultaneous micro-macro vision capabilities within a dream, and this would hint at a more dynamic perceptual ability in lucid dreams, in contrast with normal waking consciousness. The perception of time as being linear, as it often presents itself in waking reality, shifts to a interconnected, web-like feeling, a time-sense. Perhaps an ancestral experience of time. When we experience timelessness, we also often release fear and resistance and this is why I think these experiences can be so incredibly valuable.
