Dreams as a Second Life?

We spend almost a third of our lives asleep. For me, sleep is a second reality. I sleep no less than eight hours and treat the whole process with real care. Quality sleep is one of my highest priorities in life — I even track its phases and other metrics with an Oura Ring.

Since childhood I’ve had, without ever asking for it, a knack for lucid dreaming — the kind where you can steer the plot. My dreams are often dense and elaborate: space battles, political intrigue, fights with creatures I can’t name. Though sometimes the most ordinary, domestic little stories show up too.

For a long stretch, especially before I turned thirty, I often dreamed of being killed — and quite successfully. I was shot, stabbed, run through with swords, blown up with a grenade launcher, strangled, thrown from heights, drowned, detonated inside cars. I even thought about seeing a sleep specialist! The sensations were so real that to this day I don’t understand how my brain knows what any of it feels like — since, thankfully, I’ve never lived through such things in reality. But anyone who has had sex in a dream knows how convincing that experience can be, every bit as much as the waking one. Have you been through anything like this?

A few of the stranger episodes:

— I’ve wielded a samurai sword in my dreams so many times, with such precision, that I have a feeling I could pull it off in real life too.

— Back in school there was a time I lived through my entire coming day in a dream. Everything matched, point for point: how I woke up, how I went to class. The only difference was that in the dream I drove a cool red car, which of course I didn’t own at the time. When I woke up, I was so certain the day had already been lived that I asked my parents to let me stay home — and stayed.

— If you’ve seen Christopher Nolan’s Inception, then know this: the phenomenon of a dream within a dream is real. I can confirm it from personal experience. Once I was staying at the Lefay Resort & Spa on Lake Garda. First I dreamed about gangs settling scores, but then I found myself on the third or fourth level of a dream within a dream. I knew I was asleep, and suddenly I desperately wanted to wake up. When I “managed” it, I found myself in a room exactly like the real one, but… the light switch was a different color. That tiny detail threw me completely — I realized I was still asleep. It was genuinely eerie! I tried to wake up again and couldn’t. By then in open panic, I started asking myself: what if I never truly wake up?

— One time a woman named Sevilia taught me, in a dream, to travel between parallel worlds, and I waited to meet her in ordinary life — so far without luck.

Sometimes I see my late parents in my dreams, but no communication between worlds takes place. They’re simply like characters in a film.

Another strange thing — the slowing-down effect in dreams. When I’m running or trying to escape, my movements at times seem to grind to a crawl, and I close in, unavoidably, on the collision. That almost always brings anxiety and fear, and often leads to an immediate waking.

I’ve tried to extract some practical use from my dreams. Once I dreamed of the S&P index, and I even wrote it down, but it turned out to be wrong. It was some other number.

Insights do come to me in dreams, I just very rarely write them down.

What I have managed to develop over the years is an intuitive sense of trouble coming a day or two ahead — and it concerns not only me but the people close to me. I started warning them, but almost always the event is already inevitable.

They say the brain can’t invent faces in dreams — it uses ones we saw at some point.

I’ve also noticed that dreams without alcohol the day before are deeper and more vivid.

Plenty of questions remain for me. Is lucid dreaming a skill or a personal quirk? If it’s a skill, how do you build it? Is it true that with dreams like these the brain rests worse? And what are dreams, anyway? Another reality, a link to the universe’s information field, or just our fantasies? What if I’m still asleep right now?

So I haven’t yet discovered my “periodic table” in my dreams… but the process is underway.

Here’s to pleasant and lucid dreaming for us all! 😎