I'm an astronomer, and I pride myself on my powers of detailed observation; I would like to add to our knowledge of the sleep state. I have saved the Earth from nuclear war, the Galaxy from its core exploding, the Universe from final heat death.

I have inhabited a score of other bodies and personalities, from the distant past to the technological future. One of my more interesting lucid dreams lasted for over five years in the dream time frame, during which I lived in the far distant future, in a body very different from my present one.

I would actually fall asleep in this "nest" life. Interestingly, I did not have lucid dreams in this other life, but each time I awakened from the "nested" sleep I would become instantly aware that I was having a lucid dream, and each time I chose to stay in the dream.

This was far in the future, when the moon had broken up to form lovely multicolored rings, which I would watch with my wife and little girl in the cool evening twilight.

SOURCE: Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge & Howard Rheingold, 1990, pp.177-8. Original passage untitled.

EDITOR'S NOTE

I chose this as a lucid-dream example partly for its strange form. SC doesn't command the dream; he inhabits it. He even loses lucidity in his dreams-within-the-dream, repeatedly, but always recovers this clarity when he wakes back into the main dream--for five years, subjective time! It really does resemble a whole other life.

I've seen few examples of such dreams, but they are compelling; Robert Louis Stevenson argued that since clarity, consistency and continuity are what make us judge an experience as real, it gets hard to privilege a world we visit only when "awake" over one we just as consistently visit when "asleep". One might argue SC is clearest-headed in the future world--always aware it's a dream!--while in that world's sleep-dreams and in our world, alike, he's unaware he's dreaming.

--Chris Wayan

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