elilla & friends’ very occasional blog thing

1.

I often tell people: “if you keep a dream journal you’ll be able to have highly elaborate dreams like mine”. The act of keeping a journal primes your subconscious, as if some part of you who makes dreams gets the message and decides to put some effort. Or is that just an idea that makes sense to me so I tell them to people? Truth to be told, I don’t keep a dream journal, except if you count those exceptionally elaborate dreams I post on social media themselves, with Mastodon being my “journal”, or occasional jottings on my bujo when I have that feeling: “I must note this down” without knowing why. I don’t have the cinematic, plot-heavy dreams consistently or often. If I kept a dream journal, would their frequency actually increase?

2.

The idea gives me some dread. Though few of my dreams are outright nightmares, they usually aren’t super happy or pleasant either, with an anxious character to them. Scarier still are the ones that bleed into real life, with sleep paralysis hallucinations; many times including recently I have experienced a gradual shift from dreams to this reality, so that the last scene of the dream fades seamlessly into the scene I see from my body lying on bed—from virtual reality to augmented reality, so to speak. Watching a demon dog that had stalked you for your entire dream fade into the corner of your room walls, still growling at you, and then realise you're lying awake staring at the same room corner of where you sleep; or watching a parade of disembodied masks/faces coming from the gaps between boards on the ceiling, then realising you're in this reality staring at the ceiling boards—when I was young those things would make it impossible for me to sleep in my bedroom again at all. (Years later, when I found out about the Hounds of Tindalos from Lovecraft and how they are able to manifest from any architectural angle, that… did not help.)

I feel like without my hallucinations I am diminished, somehow; I want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. But maybe I am afraid that, if I start exploring my dreams, that kind of thing will return, and then where am I going to sleep? I don’t live with my mom anymore, I am the mom now; and a single mom at that; there is no one to go say: I’m scared, no lap to seek refuge into.

3.

But I am trying to rationalise something more elemental. There is a base fear that I am very familiar with, since my first few visionary experiences. I call it the “oh fuck oh shit it just got real fear”. Like maybe you are attracted to magick or wicca or lucid dreaming or something, so you go seek after it, after like, something. Though you are also modern and educated and a sceptic, so half of you constantly thinks: you’re wooing yourself, none of this is real, it’s all scams and mind tricks. Metaphors, generously.

And then after a while you do in fact stumble on something, and it’s like falling down into an abyss head first, and suddenly all those metaphors seem actually really dangerous, and the question of the exact realness of their phenomenological status takes second place to: oh no oh fuck abort abort abort.

For example, both times I tried ayahuasca I had a single dose and did not have the strong, transformative visions that the entheogen is reputed for. Both times one of the ritual workers offered me the second dose, and I refused. Both times I got the impression that they knew exactly what was going on and scoffed a bit at my cowardice. Now part of the reason I didn’t want to take the second dose is that the ayahuasca religions I had access to both were Christian-based, and I just can’t agree with Christian stuff, it repulses me at a visceral level. But that’s not the primary reason. The primary reason was that I instinctively knew that if I downed that second cup, shit would get real.

4.

Sleep paralysis phenomena should be generalised as half-sleep phenomena, I think. Not every hallucination I have is accompanied by paralysis. The paralysis itself doesn’t seem to have the same terror & dread edge that it used to have, after I learned that it’s like, a thing that happen to people, the scientific explanations of it etc., and then just let it happen. But regardless: there’s a particular kind of hallucination/vision I have when in a state that is not quite awake but not asleep, either; both before sleep and after waking up, whether or not there’s paralysis.

5.

Most often my demioneiric visions are visual or auditory; the voices used to be more common, these days I think visions are more common. The one time that involved any other sense was the ghost girlfriend, who visited me three times; that was intensely memorable, hugging an invisible girl who was not(?) there, who felt so real that I swear I could see the indentation she left on the mattress next to me afterwards. The first time she came was in a period where I was dating a lot of women, but that night I was alone, and suddenly I had a girl to hug to sleep and I was like, “how nice, one of my girls came give me a surprise and lie with me”, and only once I was awake/sober enough to realise, “waaait a minute that would be a weird thing to do and how would anyone open the apartment door at 3am anyway”—that the feeling of her was suddenly gone from arms. The second time I do not remember at all; but my memory of this vision noted down “she came three times”, so I’m reporting it like that. The third time was the only time ghost girlfriend told me something, namely the word “goodbye”; her body them seemed to dissolve into a thousand pieces; the tactile feeling of snuggling to a human body and then have it shatter under your arms like polygons in a 3D game animation was so real and unexpected and unprecedented that I was more marvelling at how this felt than anything else. Ghost girlfriend never came again, nor have I ever had a tactile experience like that again.

6.

The first experience with sleep paralysis that I remember was umbanda-related, in my early teens. It was magnificently terrifying, maybe the scariest I ever had. The voice I heard—a sickly-sweet female voice—repeated a word three times, stretching out the stressed vowel in the third; I was desperately trying to move my legs, but they would only shake nervously; the voice stretching that vowel made my leg shake like a bamboo switch in the wind, and then the half-sleep state, and the paralysis, were gone all of a sudden. With no idea what was happening or what to do, I went to the kitchen and cooked something purely to calm down. Then I dug through my grandmother's husband's family's old box of books, and found Polyanna, which even to 11ish-year-old me felt too facile and condescending; but at that moment the book saved me, its message of positive thinking and optimism is absurd motivational-speaker material in daylight, but past midnight and terrified? it was a life raft in a sea of terror, it made it possible for me to try to sleep again. Then the same voice did the same thing—a word, three times, long vowel at third, leg shaking etc., with the same effect; only it was a different word this time. Curiously, that made it less scary; a weird thing happens to you and it’s a dreadful unexplained phenomenon, if it happens twice it’s like, a thing that happens. Repetition defuses. I was finally able to sleep.

I was able to remember the two words for years later, but I never noted them down and at some point I forgot them. How I wish I had them in the era of the Internet to look up, to analyse with my linguistics skills…

7.

A widespread half-asleep phenomenon that I also have and that one of my kids inherited from me: Mind radio. This is when you hear voices saying sentence fragments in your mind when you're about to sleep, in quick succession, changing speaker for each fragment, as if you were zapping through radio stations: I don’t drink milk I don’t drink—today she was fond of white jackets—in Vietnam the peasants might—nani ittenda, kono yaroo—butterflies rose and pink, I will give you, etc.

Mind radio does not sound like the voice of the normal internal dialogue, intangible in your mind; there's a definite acoustic quality to them, the voices have a very specific timbre and volume and a definiteness of sound. At the same time you're aware they are in your mind; you don't think they're coming from real life, that there might be a physical person in the room with you.

My mind radio tends to be pretty unpleasant and cause the oh-shit-it's-getting-real fear, which bothers sleep. I usually dread this when it happens, and try to drown it out with a youtube video or something. The voices don't normally make any sense, at least not in an obvious way; but mine lean towards mean words and a certain aggressive tone. Once I tried experimentally asking them things, inspired by techniques of how one explore one's plurality. The succession of sentence fragments didn't really reply directly, but I felt like they were kinda interacting with what I was asking, if in a sarcastic/mocking way sometimes. That's another rabbit hole I didn't get very deep into.

8.

Only now in my middle age, I started having an occasional phenomenon that seems to be a visual analogue to mind radio, happening in the same situation. Instead of voices I see images, each lasting maybe 3–5 seconds. Like the sound of the voices, these images have a strange definiteness to them; I'm not normally able to conjure images in my mind, I have a poor visual imagination, but these images are as if I was looking at a drawing, every detail visible. I can't make any sense of them, and like a dream the memory of them disappears fast. A chair on a furry carpet. A toy duck with ducklings. A masked man sitting and staring at me. The moon and stars, etc.

Curiously, these flashing images don’t seem to cause the type of dread that commonly accompanied my auditory mind radio, and accompanied also many (but not all) of the half-asleep, “augmented reality”-type visions. Could I invite the mind images on purpose? I have a vague idea of how to do that; a journal, the absence of distractions like music or podcasts, and just asking, opening myselves to it. Do I dare?

9.

A half-sleep phenomenon I experienced at least twice and never saw described anywhere else. I am sleeping somewhere outside and under the stars, somewhere natural, with all the stars we don't see in the cities. I always feel at peace under stars, like coming home, so I stare at them with love and gratitude. Eventually I close my eyelids, and find to my surprise that I can still see or imagine the stars, in all their incountable glory, exactly where they were before, every colour and position and everything. Baffled, I open my eyes again; there's all the stars. I close my eyes; the stars continue to be there.

Like in the “mind TV zapping”, the visual quality of these stars is tangible, concrete; very different than trying to picture things in my mind on purpose. I never had this happen with anything other than stars. It's as if stars, and stars only, could pierce right through the cover of my eyelids.

10.

I saw a recommendation that you try to talk to characters in your dreams, even while awake—like just write on a notebook and “imagine” or “pretend” you're talking to them, and you might be surprised at the answers. This seems exactly parallel to how it works to talk to plural selves, which leads to the obvious question: if the beings in your dreams are you, or at least some of them are you, are they a type of plural self?

11.

I like the idea of blurring the lines between dream and reality—wearing a piece of clothing you remember wearing in a dream, for example, or adopting a catchphrase or humming a melody, etc. If dream-personas are a type of plural self—could you invite a dream self to front? Extract them right out of one reality to the other?

12.

Conversely, could you have your awake-time plural selves hang out together in dreams, as in with different dream-bodies, to have adventures or romance or guidance etc.? Maybe lucid dreaming techniques could help inducing that?

13.

An experience I've had countless times was to fall deeply in love with someone in a dream, only to wake up and find out that the recipient of my affection does not exist, which is a very offputting kind of bummer. But I've had sequential dreams more than once—like the recent series of dreams that all took place at the “decrepit ghetto neighbourhood somewhere in Tōkyō” which achieved some notoriety, culminating in that cinematic story with the teenage serial killer/performance artist character.

Apparently it’s something that dream explorers do, try to get back at an old dream on purpose, to continue unfinished business or just to explore promising territory. Could I have been doing this all along when I have one of those romantic dreams, and keep up a long-term dream-relationship?