Dreamside
Page 22
The novel describes techniques for incubating lucid dreaming. I didn’t invent these techniques. Most of them are taken and adapted from some of the research papers I mentioned above. Anyone seriously interested in developing lucidity while dreaming is invited to try them. The idea is to pepper your waking day with conscious references to lucidity, so that when you sleep that same content will find its way into your dream. The “hands” technique is a good place to start. My own experiments were only partially successful. I could reach the point of lucid awareness but I could never sustain the lucid dream: it would hit a “dissolve” point quite early. Perhaps you would have better luck. I should warn you that natural lucid dreamers do report that the experience of false awakening can be disturbing (I called these “repeaters” in the novel). I can’t vouch for the success of the reality checking techniques I offer, which are fictional, though genuine lucid dreamers have reported that hitting a light switch is helpful. If you are dreaming the light tends to come on, but in another room.
Language – speaking it or writing it – is possibly the most conscious thing we can do. On the planet of the human psyche it lives on the well-lit side, whereas dreaming happens on the dark side. That’s why message transmission during lucid dreaming breaks down. In our normal dreams we might think that people speak things to us but they don’t. Not in the normal time-frame of sequential twanging of the vocal chords anyway. We apprehend communication in a radically different way and then treat it as though it were speech because we don’t know any better. But I suspect – and now I’m moving into the realms of speculation – that we also actually accomplish this other form of communication quite regularly during our waking life. Our apprehension of the practice is eclipsed by our capacity to speak, but it manifests regularly in what we call intuition and inter-subjectivity; group-mind and insight; telepathy and thought transference.
I wrote Dreamside before I became a father. The arrival of children easily confirmed for me the existence of telepathy. Any mother who has sat down to dinner only to hear – as if on cue - her baby in the next room wake up and cry will authenticate this. You feed, I feed. It’s so blindingly obvious a feature of human behaviour that I can’t understand why the dalek side of us human beings resists an acceptance of these things. Perhaps there is an evolutionary danger in paying the group-mind too much attention. But as soon as you enter into family life you find it demonstrated over and over.
Dreamside explores this idea of group mind. If the three levels of consciousness are waking, sleeping and dreaming, it operates in a fourth corridor. It represents my first fictional visit to the fourth corridor and although my subsequent novels have been – for good or ill – all rather different, the common thread is the one that runs through this labyrinthine corridor and finds its way into many different chambers. I hope you enjoyed finding your way in; and that that something in this afterword will also bring you back.
Graham Joyce November 2012