Brian Eno

I used to be a pretty regular lucid dreamer. Lucid dreaming is the peculiar ability to become conscious in your dream. Originally developed in me as a (oblique) strategy for dealing with nightmares, lucid dreaming became, for a period, one of my favorite things to do. Its a tricky proposition and a careful balancing act. You have to be ever vigilant while lucid dreaming to not get sucked back into the dream while also not allowing yourself to become so conscious that you wake up. There are some good strategies for maintaining a lucid dream – such as never letting your eyes rest too long on any one detail or frequently looking down at your hands – but eventually I always tip too far one way or the other and find myself either awake in bed or sucked back into the vortex of an unconscious dream. But those brief moments of lucidity are wonderful and addictive.

Once, during Christmas break from Hampshire College, I had a couple of lucid dreams that were exponentially more realistic than anything I experienced before or since. One night, while sleeping in my grandmother’s house, I had a very fitful night. I kept experiencing that alarming sensation of physically falling and I kept getting stuck in dreams, unable to pull myself awake. After a couple of restless hours, I decided to get up and get a glass of water. I sat up, rubbed my eyes and yawned, and stepped out of bed. I wandered into the hallway and had the strangest sensation that my feet weren’t moving. Everything else seemed exactly as it should’ve been except that I wasn’t walking. I felt more like I was floating. I turned around and looked back into the bedroom, and there I was, lying in bed, asleep. Terrified, I dove back into the bed and woke up again. Heart pounding, I lay in bed for several minutes, trying to get up the courage to get out of bed. Finally, I felt ready and I gingerly pulled myself up and got out of bed. Nervously, I turned around, but this time the bed was empty. Relieved, me and my body went into the bathroom for some water. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t have been so quick to leap back into my body, but I was too scared that if I didn’t go back immediately, I wouldn’t be able to get back in at all.

The next night, I had a dream that I was walking across the campus at Hampshire. I ran into a friend of mine on the path between the library and my dorm. I told her I was having a dream and she said that she knew, she was having a dream too. We both marveled at the realistic nature of the dream and our apparent ability to share the same psychic space. We came up with a secret code that we could use to remind ourselves of our shared experience while awake, and vowed to hook up again in the conscious world as soon as we could. When I woke, I was elated. I was sure we had contacted each other and I couldn’t wait to see her and check her side of the story. The only problem was that we still had a couple of weeks of Christmas break before we’d see each other again. As the vacation dwindled, so did my conviction that we had actually met in a dream. Still, I found her after school started and, without any introduction, uttered our secret code phrase. Of course, she looked at me like I was completely nuts.

Her name was Kathy and she was beautiful, but crazy (a dishearteningly common combo). She was a dancer at Hampshire and we struck up a friendship based partly on that common bond. She even recruited me for a dance piece, which I reluctantly agreed to do because I liked her so much. We got closer. I asked her out. She turned me down. Still, I got the distinct feeling that she liked me – or my desire for her was strong enough to make me think that – so we kept casually hanging out.

One night, she invited me over to her room after dinner. When I showed up, there was a note on the door saying she was upstairs in Room 326 and I should come up there. I climbed the stairs and found the room. I knocked gently on the door and a sleepy voice invited me in. The room was dimly lit, with haunting sounds coming out of the stereo. When my eyes adjusted to the light, I could see Kathy lying on her stomach on the bed, getting a back rub from this guy Robert, an acquaintance and the tenant of room 326. I sat down. Minutes went by. The haunting sounds continued, flowing through the darkened room like the wandering wisps of incense smoke drifting lazily out of the ash tray by the bed. I asked what the music was. “Music for Airports”, Robert muttered, but I could hear a plea for me to leave in his voice. Kathy moaned gently as he worked his way down her back. Slowly, reluctantly, I accepted the fact that Kathy would never love me. Dispirited and dejected, I got up and slithered back down to my room, determined to pick up that heartbroken record as soon as I could.