I was dreaming this morning that I wanted to read a magazine or something, so (in my dream) I tried to switch on several lights, with no avail – in my dream they were busted or the bulbs had gone or something. This reminded me of something I read once about the fact that this happens to everyone in their dreams – it’s one way lucid dreamers can test if they’re dreaming or not.
Is this right? Is it really a universal thing? If so, isn’t that really really weird? Is there a scientific reason?
One of the characters in Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” refers to this phenomenon as a way of telling whether or not a particularly lucid dream is a dream or reality.
I, too, can confirm this lightswitch-not-working-in-dreams sentiment. The whys and wherefores, however, escape me.
I’ve switched lights on plenty of times in my dreams. Even during ‘lucid’ dreams.
Now, I’m not a psychologist, but if I were, I’d probably say that the lights were a reference to a truth hidden in your subconscience that you aren’t ready to reveal to yourself.
Sounds like your classic anxiety type dream to me. These dreams, IIRC, usually center around not being able to do something important at the time in the dream. For instance, you have to run away but your in mud and can only move your legs with great difficulity.
I had these for years though mine usually centered around not being able to pull the trigger and shot the monster/animal/person/whatever. I’d squeeze as hard as I could and the gun wouldn’t go off. Sometimes the part of the dream that included the attempted shooting would be, by far, the longest part that I’d remember. They quit, pretty much, when I retired.
Perhaps for others, but not for me. I’m in the pleasant position of never having had one of those nasty legs-in-blancmange dreams. And I’ve never even had a running-away-from-something nasty dream.
No, as I say, it was pretty ordinary. I couldn’t read my magazine (what an exciting life I must lead if my dreams are so thrilling!) and found none of my lights worked. Eh said I, and shifted slightly so that the light from the window (which, strangely enough, worked) fell on the page.
My thinking is that the mind associates lights being switched on with waking – so much so that it perceives a similar action in a dream to have the same effect, so prevents it. (In the same way that a full bladder makes you dream of finding a loo, there’s always something to prevent you from actually emptying it in the dream. Unless you’ve been drinking loads.)
Have any lucid dreamers out there managed to get the light switch to work? Does it make you wake up automatically?
For me it’s telephones. I can never get them to work. Sometimes it’s because they have three 5 buttons, and no 8, and 8 is the one I need, or I dial and can’t get through, or get a wrong number, or can’t find the person I want to speak to, etc.
I always figured it was an anxiety-related thing. It seems to have tapered off lately.
No matter how good an imagination you have, a page of a magazine is very complicated to ‘image’ in a dream and then read in any sensible way. So your mind cheats. It invents reasons why you can’t read to maintain the illusion of reality. I think of it being that subconsiously you are well aware that you are in a dream, and you don’t want to shatter the suspension of disbelief. It’s not quite the same as a lucid dream, as you are not conscious at the time that this is what you are doing. So in this case it’s nothing to do with 'hidden anxiety", you just don’t want to do anything that would spoil the story.
I usually get as far as seeing the page, but then something/someone whips it off me. Or for some reason I just can’t focus on the words.
I’m not sure if this would be a good way of establishing a lucid dream. It sounds too complicated to me, there are far easier ways.
Not being able to connect a phone call in an emergency, on the other hand, is pretty standard anxiety/frustration stuff.
[QUOTE=]
something I read once about the fact that this happens to everyone in their dreams – it’s one way lucid dreamers can test if they’re dreaming or not.
QUOTE]This not-being-able-to-turn-on-the-lights-in-my-dreams thing happens to me all the time. While I don’t deliberately use it to test whether or not I’m dreaming, I do recognize it as an aha-this-is-a-dream signal. (I have, on the other hand, deliberately used the “pinch myself to see if it hurts” test to verify that I’m dreaming.)
I’ve been doing a little photoshopping (actually with applications other than Photoshop - sorry Adobe) lately and instead of trying to cut out images and paste them, I’ve been doing it this way:
Expand the canvas of the base image to twice the normal width, leaving a large blank area (for working) to one side.
Copy a rectangular selection of the overlay image and paste it into the blank space on the base image.
Merge it down.
Use the clone brush to paint the overlay image into place on the base image, going slightly over the edges all the way around.
Zoom in and use the undo brush (with a smaller brush profile and less feathering) to trim away the excess edges and to re-expose any details of the base image that are supposed to be in front of part of the overlay image.
Judiciously use the smudge and/or blur tools to antialias the edges and to soften the overlay image to approximately the same amount of fuzziness as the base image.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Crop the image to remove the extra work space.
I meant to say that I always thought that the imability to do stuff in a dream - for me it is inability to open my eyes and see properly - was rooted in the brain’s perception of the inert state of the real physical body of the dreamer.