An Unnerving Scene.

11/15/20

It must have been a dream. Though I can’t be certain when I had it, it must have been in the last day or two; in any case, it keeps popping back up in my head.

I keep seeing an image of looking out through peephole in my door at people outside in the hallway, outside my neighbors door just across from me. I think there are three of them. Suddenly they all stop and collectively look back at my door, back at my spying eye, the fourth wall now broken and adrenaline in me surging. One of them puts his eye to the hole on the other side and that’s when I back up and look away, terrified to much as move or breathe.

Its a surprisingly unnerving scene, at least to me.

Crisis, Averted (Hopefully a Good Omen).

On November 3rd, 2020, I awoke with a song by Alter Bridge in my head. I hadn’t listened to it the night before as I was drunk and high, so naturally I wondered why my mind had selected it to be the soundtrack to my morning and, as it turned out, to my entire damn day.

This had happened before, mind you. Back in the early oughts, they were typically songs from the 70s. Free Will by Rush I remember specifically. I didn’t know which song this was, though, so I searched the lyrics. Initially, I thought it was Come to Life, but that was only after reading the lyrics — after listening to it, it was clear this wasn’t the melody. I eventually found it, though. The song is entitled, Metalingus, and I remembered having listened to it days ago — initially engaged, but ultimately turned off to the lyrics given what I interpreted to be religious overtones. In any case, it was the chorus playing in my head upon awakening:

On this day,
I see clearly
everything has come to life.

A bitter place
and a broken dream
and we’ll leave it all,
leave it all behind.

After I listened to the lyrics, I sincerely hoped this was some premonition regarding the election delivered to me by some precognative aspect of my unconscious.

I awoke that morning with a sense of determination, too. With a plan. One that went beyond my typical, mundane aims of: get to work, get through work, get home.

Relatively-speaking, I’ve had a productive last few days. I got my vehicle registration renewed, got the title taken care of, switched the plates from the Cursed Car to the truck essentially and graciously gifted to me by my all-too-awesome parental units, and that morning I would finally switch my insurance over as well — just after I voted.

I had been kind of beating myself up inside over not having taken advantage of the mail-in ballots and early voting, so I had to make sure I got my ass in gear early enough before work. Amazingly, I did. I walked down to The First Church of God, wondering on my way whether there was ever a church called The Second Church of God, and upon my arrival I was pleased to find that my atheist self did not burst into flames upon walking through the door. Given all the early voting, there was no line to speak of, either — I was in and out.

For a short period, the fact that I voted, that I did my part, no matter how pathetic and miniscule, was enough — and this despite the fact that I’ve embraced pessimism with respect to the election. I have, in other words, let myself become rather confident that the coppertone shit-stain that has been the bane of my existence for the last four years would get yet another term: sad as it is, that is where my faith in my fellow American has left me. I justified my pessimism with the logic inherent in the pessimistic philosophy once explained to me by a wise man, a man I shall call Channing, back in high school.

Pessimism, as he explained it, is a sort of win-win situation: ultimately you either find some form of joy in being right about your pessimistic predictions (which you must admit, is something) or you’re pleasantly surprised.

I really, really want to be pleasantly surprised.

It was around six or seven that data regarding the election started coming in through Google, and I kept checking it at least every half hour through my phone like a maniac. Though I’m not the biggest fan of Biden (Andrew Yang was my man), he is infinitely more preferable than the authoritarian, narcissistic twat allergic to truth, and I’m not confident I can take four more fucking years of this. You can’t imagine how bloody much I detest adopting this “lesser of two evils” mentality, but until I’m given better choices, this is the goddamned game I’m forced to play. If I must vote against rather than vote for, so be it. For as much as I respect the late George Carlin, I cannot adopt his approach toward voting — which is not to vote. It may not make that much of a difference, or even a difference at all, but — and this is the point, this is key — it COULD to some small yet nonetheless significant degree, and on top of that, it doesn’t hurt.

Only the results of the election can do that.

Looking at the numbers before all the votes are in, though, listening to these jackasses of the media spout predictions like they can fortell the future, its just a good way to conjure up anxiety and depression or fill yourself up to the brim with false hope so that when the dismal results of reality are finally provided the anxiety and depression are exacerbated, volume cranked to the max.

As with my predilection for spicy foods, I can’t help but wonder if looking at the numbers before all the votes are counted in tandem with listening to these dipshits pull projections out of their asses constitutes some form of masochism. I also wonder if scrolling through Facebook, particularly in times like these, also constitutes a form of masochism. Its like watching a cultural decline one meme, one post at a time. Though I value the diversity on my friend’s list, I find myself longing for the days in which, though we might have stark differences in our opinions, it at least seemed like we all agreed on the same, fundamental reality, and the general notion that an objective truth exists.

Make America Sane Again.

I needed to stop by Circle K on the way home for a carton of Red Traffic 100s, and I had already decided to buy a three-pack of 24 ounce cans of Labatt Ice and some chips as well. Whether it was for a celebration or for the wake of hope, I did not know. I still do not know, yet I perpetually take breaks from writing this to check the results on Google, because: masochism.

So anyway, I got my shit and began driving down that long, dark road between work and home. Briefly, I found my attention fixing on a morbid scenario blossoming in my pessimistic mind: finally, tonight, after the truck was officially mine, the day that all the paperwork was done and the thing was insured, I would drive home and something bad would happen.

That rhythmic vibrating noise — though more of a sensation than a noise — which I had been feeling and hearing since the day my father initially lent it to me, and which he had not heard when he drove it during my parents’ last visit to see me a week or two ago, would prove to be a sign of an issue of legitimate concern and my tire would fly off or something. Or a car would hit me. Or I would hit a car. Or I would collide with a goddamned deer. Something horrible that would reinforce if not confirm my fear that it was not my former car that was cursed so much as its driver.

As I drove, I cursed at the drivers that blinded me with their brights, or those blue lights some vehicles have that are technically dims but are nonethless a real, physical pain for me to see coming soaring towards me from the other side of the road.

At some point, probably about half the way home, there’s another driver. His dims are on. He seems to he slowing down. Curious. My eyes instictively swerve towards the car lights for a moment before the silhoutlette just in front of me on the road gains some clarity.

Oh. That’s why he slowed. Ah-fucking-ha! A deer. A dumbstruck, wide-eyed, stupid fucking deer. The hooved, coat-rack-headed dipshits of the forest and the roads that slice through them.

Even before I moved back to that college town for the last time, I began driving down there to drink and ultimately bar-hop with some friends of mine. Though I was less engaged with it than most of my friends, we often played billiards, and I became fascinated with this particular state of mind that could be achieved in the midst of playing the game. You had to drink enough, it seemed, but not too much. In any case, you could achieve this zone, this headspace, where you didn’t only make the shot, but you knew you would. It was born of some cocktail of confidence and determination.

You would suceed. There was simply no other option.

It was free will comandeering fate, choice dominating destiny and making it his little blessed bitch: this had to happen, would happen, I would make it happen, damn it, for there was no other choice. No alternative outcome was conceivable. And you would make shot after shot.

And I slammed on my breaks. Heard the squeal of tires against blacktop. I veered into the oncoming lane, the stopped car’s lights burning my eyes for a moment before I swerved back, around the dumb deer that, less than halfway through my swerve, manages to frolic off into the woods to my right.

I got back in my lane and continued driving as usual.

I wasn’t shaking. Never once felt the surge of adrenaline. Didn’t stop or break a sweat or pull out a smoke and light it in the feeble attempts to calm my nerves. Not even as the potential alternate outcomes of that circumstance played out in my mind — though I did have brief periods where I winced in the face of them.

Had I not sweved, or even if I had swerved but the deer had not promptly departed in the right direction, I could have hit the deer. As I swerved, I could have hit the car.

Right now, I thought to myself, as I’m driving all too calmly in an intact truck on my way to the comfort of my third-floor, one-bedroom, bachelor abode, some Other Me in an alternate universe could be in a world of shit. Repairs he can’t afford. Again. Begrudgingly and shamefully relying upon others — or likely just fucked — again.

So close. And yet somehow the potential disaster was averted.

I felt especially lucky the following morning. I went on Facebook and discovered that both my brother-in-law and the son of a woman I went to high school with had both hit deer the previous evening.

I hope my dodging of the deer bullet serves as an omen for the ultimate election results: potential catastrophe, averted.

I just can’t, can’t fucking take another four years of this.

A Forgotten Story (10/27/20 Dream).

I’m sitting at a table, engaged in a conversation with at least my mother and father. At some point in the conversation a relevant story comes to mind, and I turn towards my mother and say, “You’ll like this story.” I start telling it to her, but suddenly the sound of the alarm on my phone yanks me out of the dream.

In tandem with the all-too-familiar frustration of not being able to remember any other aspect of the dream, I can’t recall what I was going to say to my mother had the dream played out without interruption. All I can recall is that the story was about a group of women who, through their combined intelligence, made a difference in the world, an impact.

I can’t even be sure the story was an actual story or something my dream consciousness whipped up. My only association was the intriguing story of the women who constituted “human computers” as told in Cosmos: A Spacetime Oddysey, though I don’t think that was the story I intended to tell.

The Surreal Porn Dream (10/26/20).

I awoke feeling as though I’d had a deeper sleep last night than I’ve been having for the past week or two, and that the dreams I had were vivid and intense, even bordering on the surreal. Though my dream recall has been absent as of late, I always wake up knowing I’ve had dreams but feel as though there’s nothing within the reach of my waking consciousness to document. Though I often say this to myself, upon closer inspection, given I invest the required time and effort in it, it always seems that I’m able to remember details of at least a lone scene. Well, I finally did shortly after waking up this morning.

In the salvaged dream scene, I’m sitting before a desk or table in a dark room, my eyes fixed on a computer screen before me, which is playing porn. I’m masturbating with the kind of relentless intensity characteristic of me when I’m doing this while drunk and high. As the momentum builds, however, the porn on the screen begins getting weird, surreal, almost psychedlic and horror-film sort of strange. The face on the screen begins morphing, contorting, staring back at me madly with wild, bulging, unblinking eyes, but I’m too horny now to stop or even look away.

Not the sort of sneak peek into my unconsciously-generated nocturnal meanderings that makes me proud, I should mention, but at least I managed to remember it.

In keeping with the tradition of milking whatever daily dream recall I might have for insights, this dream could potentially suggest I have goals that are out of reach or that I’m distancing myself from them out of fear, and electing to instead live vicariously or through a fantasy world without consequence.

This could also be a variant of my dry-hump dreams, which I haven’t had in awhile, which seemed to suggest a fear of intimacy. If recurring dreams of having sex with cloths on suggests a fear of intimacy, though, it would seem a dream of watching porn — “having sex” vicariously — serves as a sign that the state of affairs are worsening.

I still can’t quite understand the surreal quality of the porn, however — though I did get the sense, even before remembering that scene, that there was a rather surreal, almost psychedelic quality to my dreams last night in general. So whatever it means, it extended beyond that scene.

Of the Godless & the Theological Salesman.

10/18/17

Before I get so much as a hit off my cigarette some guy in a nearby car catches me in his ocular tractor beams. I’m just not in the mood, but it’s too late to pretend I didn’t see him. As he continued to engage me in polite conversation, I feel bad for suspecting that he’s either going to ask me for a cigarette or try and sell me something.

In the midst of our talk he motions me over to his window. He doesn’t have the vibe of some maniac about to pull a gun on me or some pervert about to whip out the pistol that came with the corporeal package, so to speak, so I feel comfortable enough to approach him. As soon as I saw the pamphlet in his hands I knew I was about to be Jesused.

Damn it.

I hold up my hands politely, shaking my head at the same time, but I don’t back up as if he’s some threat. I tell him I appreciate it, but no thanks. Not my thing. He of course looks hurt, as the theological salesmen often does when confronted with the godless.

You have to have faith in something, he says. Some higher power must have put this all together, he says.

Nope. Not at all, I think to myself. I explain to him as kindly as I can that I see no evidence for a creator being. And he goes on to explain to me why there is one.

Because: The Bible.

In a matter of fact way, he tells me how dinosaurs and man lived side by side. How the earth is only six thousand years old. How he thinks (and I quote) “Hell is the sun.”

A little atheistic asshole in my head is chattering away mockingly, the bitter homunculus tearing him apart with a thousand angles of logic, but I muffle it before it escapes my mouth.

I mean, he’s not a dick. He thinks he’s doing the right thing.

He tries to tell me how nice the church community is, how they help one another, “teach” kids about sex and drugs. How he gives the church ten percent of every paycheck. How the Bible is the word of (his) god, all the contradictions were because man actually penned it, and how scientists are just myth-makers out to make money.

Look, man: we did indeed evolve from apes. Flintstones is not an accurate depiction of our history. The sun isn’t hell, just one of many stars, and without them life as we know it could not exist. And the universe? Current estimations place it closer to 14 billion years old.

Just once, for fuckity-fuck’s sake, give me a Pagan. Give me a Buddhist. Their core philosophies seem to be: honor the earth and discipline the mind. I can, without effort, respect that. It is far less likely that while talking with them I will have to hold my tongue and choke back my fucking frustration.

He wrote his number on the pamphlet and handed it to me again. I finally took it, stuck it in my back pocket. I told him, just for a counter-view, that he should watch the television series, Cosmos, sometime.

Bask in the godless beauty of the universe and stuff.

Oh, the Way She Walks.

10/20/20

On front counter, I was changing trash after I first clocked in and it seemed this one girl, a new, redheaded girl who was working drive thru along with some others, kept looking my way. Its the kind of look you can feel and I find my immediate interpretation of it laughable: they felt to me like gazes of interest.

I had seen her before, though only in passing, and I don’t even know her name. She was one of those women I find myself instantly attracted to but then immediately start trying to talk myself out of it: its just that she’s a new female coworker, I told myself, and she probably has a boyfriend anyway, and even if she doesn’t, she wouldn’t fuck you in a million years, and she’s probably not your type anyway, and you’re just trying to distract yourself by finding a new girl to fixate on.

Its wariness borne of the past. It takes me forever to let go of shit, to get over shit. I find I feel about women the way I’ve come to feel about vehicles: I don’t want to like them too much, that way when things inevitably go to shit with respect to them I won’t be crushed and reinforce my paralyzing paranoia of it happening again.

Once or twice today, in the short time she was there during my shift, we nearly bumped into each other. On one such occasion I ended up walking behind her. I tried not to look, tried not to be a pervy fuck, but when a woman already has a nice body, a nice, hourglass figure, and in addition to that she’s wearing yoga pants, there’s just no way around it.

That wasn’t all, either.

She has The Walk.

The way in which some women move is erotic. Damn near hypnotic. It is a walk that I see only rarely, and certainly not often enough. Its smooth, fluid, rhythmic, seductive: they sway back and fourth, almost serpentlike, and its one ass cheek up, one down, smoothly alternating with every step.

At some point when I passed her, I think it was when she was leaving, she gave me what seemed like a shy glance, and it gave me the same kind of feeling I had gotten earlier in the day, when I caught her looking at me.

The walk and general vibe of the girl brought to mind two women I know: one, Lilly, who I consider a good friend, and another, Anne, who was my last exgirlfriend from over a decade ago, and who I also dreamed of recently.

This is, in all liklihood, all in my head. I’m not confident the girl has any interest in me. Just after I got home, however, I began writing about it and was curious enough about the walk to look it up on Google. Turns out that studies suggest women unconsciously use a sexier, slower gait as bait during the heights of fertility and that a fluid, sensual gait may suggest orgasmic ability. That last part makes sense with respect to Anne and (presumably) Lilly, both of whom were incredibly sexual women.

On another note, I wish I’d just get laid already or find a way to turn my sexual urges off. I think the tension of this limbo is beginning to get to me.

Anxiously Driving in the Rain.

After I try to manage my anxiety all the way to work, driving in the rain, I think to myself:

I drive every day. To work five days out of the week, and on my days off I typically force myself to go grocery shopping or drive to Circle K. Despite driving every day, the terror of driving remains. It’s there when road conditions are top notch and intensifies if its raining or snowing.

Shouldn’t constant exposure result in a reduction and eventual extinction of this response?

As has been the case lately, I’d also been thinking how I really need to get a better-paying job, hopefully one closer to my apartment and which does not require driving down a long, dark, deer-infested stretch of road every workday.

I’m usually reactive, not proactive, so this is not going well for me. I feel the anxiety swelling in me. Which does not make me eager to stop smoking weed, which would be a good idea as many if not most decent jobs are going to require a drug screening.

Which, I must say, is not only fucking stupid, but unethical in my view. This is my body, what business is it of yours what I do with it? Judge me on my behavior, on my work ethic, not my body chemistry.

I’ve considered (as I do chronically) getting back on antidepressants again so the anxiety doesn’t triple upon stopping the weed, as prescription pharmaceuticals should get a pass on such tests.

I also wondered if I might be able to get prescribed marijuana for my anxiety and depression. Though this seems incredibly unlikely, it would solve at least one potential problem.

Especially after my withdrawal symptoms from hell when I tried to ween myself off of Effexor XR some years back, I certainly trust weed more than the aforementioned prescription pharmaceuticals.

But its just a comforting fucking fantasy.

And why is it that every time you take an illicit drug, or the legal drug alcohol, people say you’re masking the problem, but every time a psychiatrist gives you a prescription for a drug its considered treatment?

And why are psychiatrists the only legal drug dealers?

I was also feeling bad because I’d failed to respond to Moe’s texts this morning. He had gotten a job at Amazon and wanted me to get a job there, too, as you start out making four dollars more an hour than I’m making at my present job after sixteen years of service. The issue is that I wanted to find a job that was closer and better paying, and while this job was clearly better paying, it was about double the distance I took to work every day, and just as the Winter season is approaching, no less.

Despite the money, I just can’t bear that anxiety every day. Particularly if I have to stop smoking pot, which would be a necessity for this job.

Hating my emotions, loathing the fear standing in my way, angry at the anxiety over driving to work in the rain, I clock in and go about changing the trash. As I make my way to the break room I see Dustin sitting down at the table. Casually, I say hey to him, and after he responds, that’s when I realize my ginger coworker is redder in the face than usual, tears running down his freckled features, voice flailing.

I ask him what’s wrong. I ask if he’s okay.

The fifteen-year-old son of a friend of his, a woman who he had only seen yesterday, had just called and informed him that she had died in a car crash after driving her mother to work.

“That was her greatest fear,” he sobbed. “She was always afraid of driving in the rain.”

I failed to add that I shared that terror, failed to report that it had been occupying my mind as well. That certainly wouldn’t help him. I honestly don’t know what would. I just touched his shoulder and spoke with him a bit, though there’s really never much one can say at times such as these.

What, It’ll all be okay? Cheer up? Death is an integral part of life?

I got him some more napkins from up front as he did his damnest to pull himself together so he could go back to work.

I was even more anxious tonight as I drove down that dark, rainy road between my fast food place of employment and my one-bedroom apartment. But I made it home.

It could be worse.

Check Your Baggage (10/11/20 Dream).

It was a long, endurung dream that I only recall a relatively small portion of. A group of people and I come to crash at someone’s house and at some point I come to learn it is the house of Anne, my ex-girlfriend who I broke up with at least thirteen years ago and with whom I stopped speaking a short time thereafter. I’m sleeping in this large room for the night, hoping all the while that we leave before she or her daughter arrive home, hoping she never even learns that I was there.

Just before we leave, the door to my room opens and from behind it I can see a incredibly fat man in blue scrubs and a large girl in blue scrubs farther away, though they don’t seem to notice me and I never see their faces. Meanwhile, I’m trying to fit my things into my bookbag — my dark blue jeans, I recall, was one particular item I had a difficult time fitting in there — but the zipper won’t stay closed and its far too stuffed to close properly anyway.

Finally, we leave. Me and another person take my Sunfire, and were on the road for awhile, a dirt road that reminds me a lot of the road halfway around the block from my parents house and which leads to a park I’ll call Hades Hollow. We’re driving along as I’m still trying to wrestle with my baggage, and it suddenly comes to my attention that I’m the one in the driver seat. Despite the fact that we had been moving down the road just fine, I suddenly get my eyes on the road in front of me and take the wheel.

This theme of being part of some apparently nomadic group of people crashing at other peoples houses has featured in other recent dreams. Since the house is a symbol of the self, this might suggest my act of trying to change or find myself by exploring possibilities, at least psychologically. Of course, it likely means something that in this particular dream my nomadic group and I crashed at a house I subsequently learned was Anne’s house.

So why Anne? Online, while exploring potential interpretations, I came upon the perspective that an ex may appear in our dreams to bring us a message — perhaps that we need to let go of whatever baggage we may have regarding them, but also so that we hold onto the lessons our relationship with them offered us.

Why was the guy and her so overweight? Seeing yourself or someone else as fat in a dream is supposed to suggest your overindulgance and a lack of discipline in some area of your life, and if another person is fat, than that person is thought to represent the aspect of yourself which us being overindulgant.

It makes me think of the guy she was with right after me, during that short period when her and I were still talking. He had accused her of being a nympho. Neither her nor I ever saw it that way. She also said around that time that our sexual drives were a close match. When I countered with the fact that I had gone five years without sex (a record I have now broken, having now gone nine to ten years without sex), she immediately countered with asking me how many times a day I masturbated. Currently, at 41, its at least once, though I’d say typically twice a day.

Might this be the overindulgance represented by her weight on,the dream? Or is it perhaps in reference to my drinking, which I entirely accept constitutes an overindulgance? Given that it was in a bedroom of her house where I believe I saw a glimpse of her, and that amazing, sexual activities are clearly associated with her and bedrooms, sexual overindulgance seems the more likely interpretation of the two.

Of course, there was also the issue with the bookbag — the fact that the zipper was broken and I was trying to fit too damn much in there. This would also seem to be a form of overindulgance. Of possible relevance is a line from the song “She’s Got Issues” by The Offspring which she frequently quoted: “check your baggage at the door.” I seem to remember this in the context of the bedroom, and what it seems she meant when she said it to me was to just stop the obsessive thinking and worrying and just be present and free with her.

Her and the guy were also wearing scrubs, however, and while this may reflect the fact that she was working towards becoming a nurse when I last knew her, it also serves as a dream symbol — people in scrubs represent some aspect of your personality that is healing you, encouraging positive change.

I was still wrestling with my baggage as we were on the road — until I realized I was the one driving, and then I took the wheel.

The potential message? Leave your baggage alone and concentrate on moving forward.

Awake, Yet Mistaking Dream for Reality.

10/9/20

Though I had hoped I would remember at least some part of a dream upon waking up today, I recalled nothing. As I was drinking java and smoking a cigarette maybe a half an hour later, however, I was watching a YouTube video regarding the inaccurate ways to draw a human face. As the woman in the video was providing commentary on her example of doing this wrong, she pointed out the differences between the eyes in her drawing — and that triggered a memory of a dream scene.

I was sitting at a table with a group of people when, upon looking at someone’s eyes — and though I believe it was someone I know in waking life, I can’t quite remember who it was — it looks as if one eye was gray while the other was blue. I noticed this just before she turned her head to my right, and in such a way that I could only see the most-certainly-blue eye.

Without a second thought, I focused in on her face and asked, like a curious child, “Are your eyes different colors?”

Almost immediately after saying that, she turned her head back to an angle where I could see both eyes again, and now I could clearly see that both eyes were blue. I was confused, as I felt certain one was gray just a moment ago, though it nonetheless appeared clear now that I was wrong. It also came to my attention that something akin to this had happened earlier, that I had made a similar mistake just a short time ago, and though I have now forgotten what it was I think it may have also involved someone’s face.

It dawned on me that the others around me might feel that I’m acting weird and I suddenly feared that not only was I likely insane, but I was making this apparent fact pretty fucking obvious to everyone around me. In frustration, fear, and embarassment, I closed my eyes, sighing in frustration to myself as I placed my face down on the table in a sense of defeat.

In retrospect, it seems that I was to some degree awake within the dream and my attentiveness to details in my surroundings betrayed the fluid nature of the environment. The issue was that I interpreted this fluidity, this sudden change of detail in the dream, not as evidence that I was in fact in a dream but, assuming this was the waking world, as evidence suggesting my brain or mind was malfunctioning, that it was not a glitch in the world around me but a glitch in myself.

And yes, assuming dreams are subliminally-governed, internally-generated simulations of the mind, I suppose a more accurate interpretation would be that it was a glitch in myself and the world around me, as they are syonymous, but you know what I mean.

In any case, in the act of prematurely dismissing myself as insane, I unknowingly dodged another opportunity to become fully lucid in the context of a dream. This has certainly happened before, even in a recent dream (9/28/20), when I stepped into my father’s truck (which I’ve been driving in waking life) and became lucid. In the dream, I interpreted this sudden, altered state of heightened awareness to suggest that I was high and drunk, however, and so also missed the opportunity to become fully awake.

This sort of thing has happened to me so often in dreams that I feel a term must exist for it somewhere, though if such a term exists I’ve been unable to find it.

They aren’t exactly lucid dreams or waking dreams, which is to say dreams in which you’re awake and know that you’re dreaming, as despite being awake I don’t know that I’m dreaming. They aren’t exactly false awakenings, either, though I’ve had false awakenings before — and even worse, a false awakening loop. False awakenings are dreams in which you dream you’ve woken up in the “real” world despite the fact that you’re still dreaming. You wake up in bed, go about your morning routine, and then at some point it dawns on you that you’re actually still dreaming — often the result of noticing some mismatch between the real world and the dreamscape.

False awakenings are distinct from lucid dreams in that while you are awake within them, you don’t know you’re dreaming, which is why I’ve elected to use the term “false awakening” over “lucid dreaming” when slapping a title on dreams I wake up within.

The issues are that these dreams don’t start off with me waking up in bed and going about my morning routine. To the contrary, as with typical dreams, they seemingly start in medias res; in addition, the dream narrative may have little to no relation to the circumstances of my waking life, yet this never tips me off to the fact that I’m dreaming. However awake I am, I presume the world around me is the “real” world. I am nonetheless awake within these dreams, however: I am aware in a way comparable to the state of consciousness I experience in waking life or the “real” world (both of which you should take to be synonymous terms, and both of which I use interchangably, if you haven’t noticed, for lack of a better, or at least less-misleading term).

In these dreams I have even fought against waking up into the real world as from within the context of the dream I seem to be doing the opposite, which is to say falling asleep — particularly nerve-wracking when I happen to be driving in the dream, which is often enough the case.

The issue preventing me from realizing I’m in a dream is not awareness, I have deduced, but access to relevant memories. Even in my more mundane, typical dreams I have noticed that the dreams often provides its own history, my own backstory, often one so elaborate that I feel certain I must have had countless dreams within this particular “dream world” before and have consequently build up a set of memories through experience specific to it. Remembering such memories are dependent upon me being in that dreamworld in question, too — unless, of course, I’m able to remember it upon awakening in the real world and write it down, though such memories still remain inaccessible in dreams other than those taking place in that specific dreamworld.

I accept the dream world as real, perhaps, because my compartmentalized dream memories support that delusion and that gets in the way of me accessing my real-world memories.

None of these sorta-lucid dreams, sorta-false-awakenings appear to be absurd in comparison to the laws governing the real world, however. This may mean that the typical techniques recommended for Dream-Induced Lucid Dreaming (DILDS) may prove effective should I decide to start practicing them. Such techniques teach one to question whether or not they’re dreaming by means of two distinct sets of strategies.

One strategy under this banner involves keeping a dream diary and identifying recurring elements in your dreams — “dreamsigns” — by studying your dreams and noting recurring themes, images, or absurd elements (talking animals, etc) and learning to question your reality (“Am I dreaming?”) every time you come across them in the real world. Once the pattern is established, so the hypothesis goes, you’ll start doing this in dreams as well.

Another involves learning to regularly commit behaviors that have distinct results depending on what world you’re in, which is to say the dreamscape or the real world. Lets say, for instance, that every two hours throughout the day you condition yourself to jump upward a few times in the sincere attempt to fly, or push your finger into your palm in the transient yet sincere expectation that your finger will penetrate your palm with ease and come out the other side. Its also been suggested that you routinely check digital clocks or try to flip light switches on and off, as for whatever reason numbers and text change every time you look at them (and numbers on digital clocks become meaningless lines, or disappear altogether, leaving behind either a steady or blinking colon, at least in my experience) in a dream, and light, to the contrary, fails to change at all when utilizing light switches.

The consequence of these perceptual triggers (dreamsigns) and conditioned behaviors (reality-checks) could therefore provide a way for you to distinguish between the two worlds, whichever one you happen to be in at the time.

Even better, you can condition the perceptual triggers of dreamsigns to in turn trigger your reality-check behaviors. For instance, I often become awake within a dream when I’m in the driver seat of a car, truck, or some other vehicle, probably as a result of my real-life anxiety in that context. While that circumstance is by no means specific to dreams, then, it is a recurring element in both my sorta-lucid dreams and daily real life. On average, I get into my vehicle at least twice a day, five days out of the week. It still constitutes a dream sign, however, and one I’ve already identified. Given that, I could take up the practice of trying to push my finger through my palm every time I sit in the driver seat of whatever vehicle I happen to be driving at the time.

If I’m not awake, that may ignite memories that conjure my lucidity. If I am awake, it may trigger memories that enlighten me to the fact that despite being awake, I’m nonetheless in the dreamscape.