Terry's 3M's
My brother-in-law is teaching me how to play chess. That's what I was doing last Wednesday night when Voyager was on. As a result, I forgot to watch and tape the show.
Fortunately, our local station repeats the episodes on Sunday nights. So, last night I watched and taped. The episode was Wakeful Moments. In the episode, Chakotay talks about lucid dreaming.
It reminded me of a conversation that I had had with someone...oh, about 20 years ago. While recounting a nightmare to a friend, I told her that at the scariest part of the dream, I told myself that I didn't like the way the dream was going, so I went backwards in the dream (VCRs were still someone's dream then--or else I would have used the rewind while viewing as an illustration of what I had done) and restarted the dream from the point where it had begun to go bad. We were both into a lot of metaphysical stuff at the time, and she made a remark about me being very advanced in order to do that. That most people could not control their dreams.
This seemed rather odd to me as I do it on a regular basis. I get the same feeling when a character in a book or movie questions whether they are asleep or awake and someone asks him/her whether they dream in black and white or color, using color as a means of showing that the person is awake. Except that I rarely dream in black and white. Almost all my dreams are in color. Some are precognitive. I don't keep a dream diary. Although, during the times that I was keeping a paper journal, I would occasionally write down a dream that stayed with me through the day.
However, there is one dream that haunts me when I have let a great deal of stress get to me. I am so glad that it has been several years since I had that dream. I do eventually get things under control, but, it takes several minutes that seem like an eternity.
In the dream, I am surrounded by whiteness. There is nothing but white. I feel myself rising and while I am rising, there is a overwhelming feeling of terror. I scream. I can feel myself screaming. I can take my hands and touch my mouth and feel the scream. I know this is a dream. I know that if I open my eyes, I will wake up. I try and try to open my eyes, but, they won't open. Eventually, I do open my eyes. And then I'm awake for hours afterward because I am afraid to go back to sleep because I'm afraid of falling back into the dream.
That same friend tried to tell me that that was an out-of-body experience and my soul was trying to astral project itself somewhere. In that case, I'm just as glad that I don't leave my body. I have a feeling that if there are truly cases of possession, that that's how the evil invades the body.
Well, this is starting to sound a little weird. So, I guess I'll leave now. If usually being in control of dreams and dreaming in color makes me odd. Well, I've always considered myself to be an eccentric. Why stop when sleeping?
for the border background set.