A Night in the Life of a Lucid Dreamer
It’s probably different than you think
When you fall asleep watching Better Call Saul, perhaps it’s not a total shocker when you’re suddenly swept into a dreamy world and find yourself getting dessert with Mike Ehrmantraut, the notoriously stone-faced, fun-loathing side character that made his debut in Breaking Bad. If you’re like many people, these sorts of riotous incongruities may actually be common.
As in most dreams, the surreal situation didn’t strike me as odd. I took it at face value as the smell of freshly churned ice cream wafted through the air of the mom and pop shop and the immovable cinderblock of a man glowered toward me with glacial indifference.
Typically, lucid dreams — dreams where I’m aware that I’m dreaming and can exert a level of control over what’s taking place — begin as any other dream does. It’s when I take notice of the bizarre or impossible that I start piecing together that a dream is a dream.
Yet far more often than not, like most people, I remain oblivious to the fact that I’m dreaming each time I drift off into a new one. I struggle to attain lucidity. In non-lucid dreams, nothing will seem askew when dinosaurs roam the streets, the laws of physics are in flux, and the line between dead and living blurs. I’ll commune with the people and creatures I’ve lost in a world that’s far different than the one I went to sleep in, and yet I’ll be none the wiser to that dissonance. I’ll believe everything I see without question.
Take my ice cream outing with Mike for example. While this part of the dream that I describe is vivid, it is not lucid. I recall the following details clearly, but I didn’t have conscious awareness throughout our entire interaction.
The grim reaper in plain clothing and I sat opposite one another at a table barely big enough for two. It wobbled slightly as he grimaced and a disconcerting silence settled in.
“And what would you two like?” a brown-haired waitress came up to us and asked. She had a willowy figure, light freckles, and rosy cheeks that did little to warm the grizzled enforcer’s stoic demeanor.
“And what would you two like?” she patiently repeated the words with a genial smile. But Mike glared back with gargoyle lips.
As the walls of the building began to buckle from the growing tension, I decided it fell on me to order first.
“I’ll have a small coffee ice cream, thanks!”
“And would you like that in a cup or cone?” she replied with a weightless grin.
“Waffle cone, please!”
“And you?” She turned her focus again on Mike. But he only blinked, as if the answer to her question was so scathingly obvious it didn’t even demand a response. Joy drained from her face as Mike blinked once more.
“I’ll have a large vanilla cheesecake flavor in a cup. Sprinkles.” The words emerged with a monolithic sternness. He spoke with such gruff certainty it was as though he was cynical of anyone who would ever deign to order differently. An icy animus permeated his pupils.
Minutes later, the young waitress made her way back to our table and handed the man his ice cream with a kindly “Here you go!”
“Thank you,” he said, with eyes that read “I’ve dissolved people in barrels.”
Mike sat with arms folded, jaw locked tight, and the begrudgingly scooped dessert sitting motionless in front of him. His gaze held firm as I cautiously eyed up his ice cream. I was scared to confess to him just how delicious it looked.
But there was something expectant in his scowl. We entered into a farcical standoff as chatter ricocheted off the walls and his rainbow-colored treat glistened in the tired light of an overworked fluorescent.
“Well, are you gonna ask for a bite or not?” he muttered, maintaining his catatonic still.
“I — uh.”
I wasn’t brave enough to beg the gun-wielding fixer for a bite of his frozen delicacy. But as he continued bearing down on me through swollen, granite-framed slits, I began to wonder whether “no” was even an acceptable answer.
“… Yes please?” the words surfaced ambivalently.
“Is that a question?” Mike asked in a way that sounded more like a verdict than genuine inquiry.
“Yes.” I feigned confidence.
And with that, the man who helped to build Walter White’s meth empire dipped his spoon into his ice cream and raised it toward me. Still fearful he was walking me into a trap, I grabbed the plastic white spoon from him with a weighty gulp as hot beads of sweat surfaced along my forehead.
I took a bite of the otherworldly flavor and it melted in my mouth. It was an explosion of tones and textures so profound that I wondered where this humble little parlor had been all my life. A quiet ecstasy overtook me.
Mike cast a flat and knowing glance in my direction. There was nothing friendly in the knowing, just the hardened conviction of an ex-cop confident in his dessert choices.
“Do you want another or not?” The offer was generous, but his tone remained a Soviet staccato.
Even as a lucid dreamer, I can still end up in scenarios like the one above without believing that anything is amiss. There are times when minor oddities are enough to cue me into the fact that I’m asleep, but there are others when I get indulgent treats with in-character TV protagonists. I can have the reasoning skills to know that asking for another bite of someone’s food might be considered impolite, but lack the ability to identify a fictional character as exactly that.
Later in that same dream — or in a different dream that same night — I found myself in a foreign country with a group of new friends. We were in the kitchen area of our shared hostel as the country bustled in the background. As one of them hastily washed a plate in the sink, he turned toward me and casually invited me to go “snelking” with them the following day. I’d never heard the made-up word before. “When in Rome,” I reasoned as I surveyed the tropical landscape. Whatever foreign cultural practice he had in mind, I was eager to participate, regardless of whether I’d heard the term before or not.
But as he primed me on what “snelking” was, I began to second-guess myself on whether to tag along. According to him, it entailed us venturing out in a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean and foraging for some exotic creature within the waters. Anxiety welled inside me as I reluctantly explained to my new companion that I’d had a lifelong history of ear infections, and it had thrown a wrench in my ability to enjoy these sorts of aquatic activities. He was sympathetic enough, and said that we could just meet up again afterward and grab a meal.
I kicked myself for letting my phobia win as I walked free from the kitchen.
Again here, I was in an interesting limbo where I had detailed knowledge of my waking life, but couldn’t piece together how peculiar it was to have seamlessly transitioned between dessert with Mike Ehrmantraut and this serene, islandic locale in what seemed like only minutes. I scrambled for ways to convince myself that my scenery and community made sense. I quickly concocted back stories for my new friends; it was as though I’d known them each for weeks. And I was embarrassed at the thought I might be letting them down.
But as I walked out of the room, I noticed I could barely move my legs. I marshaled every ounce of effort that I could muster into putting one leg in front of the other, but each step grew harder than the one before it. I trudged and clambered and agonized until a thought hit me like an ethereal brick.
“It’s often in dreams that I have this kind of trouble walking.”
And with that spontaneous realization, I was lucid and unencumbered. I knew that this was a dream, and I looked around at the world with a widened aperture. My eyes panned from houses to trees and toward an overcast sky. The creeping dawn rendered the scattering clouds a bluish black with streaks of molten red.
When I first began to lucid dream, the rush of excitement would be too much to keep at bay. I would defy whatever narrative I’d been placed in — what story my sleeping mind had concocted — and veer off the rails to travel elsewhere. Sometimes I would leap into the air in an attempt to fly. But I’d rise too fast and lose the reins of control, either crash landing in the grass or waking in bed as I began to fall from vertiginous heights.
Yet more often lately, I’ve been able to temper my excitement when I identify a dream for what it is. I’ll realize I’m asleep in bed, but let the narrative before me play out rather than attempting to steer it. I’ll consciously appreciate without trying to create or redirect.
In this recent dream, as I noticed I was dreaming, it wasn’t an active choice I made to launch into the sky. It was a passive acceptance of whatever the dream had in store for me next. It was a plot point in a pre-established narrative that I didn’t care to challenge.
One of the most fascinating components of lucid dreaming is the ability to be in awe of our own creation. We take in the world, baffled by the idea that we erected its very walls while reposed on a pillow. And it can be every bit as intriguing to exercise conscious control and push the bounds of the place we’ve unwittingly devised as it can be to step back and appreciate the inner workings of the subconscious as a participant rather than creator. To continue walking along the path we carved out before we noticed we were dreaming.
There was a cathartic logic to the way my subconscious arranged events, and I’m thankful I didn’t challenge that order. It was only minutes after I mentioned my fear of water to my new friends that I confronted my fear of heights.
I ascended so rapidly that towns and cities shrank beneath me in a dazzling blur of motion. I breathed a deep breath as the air grew colder and the world became smaller. I watched the planet become democratized by streaks of light that snaked between sleeping continents. And then the tiny blue dot I’d spent my life on was exactly that. An insignificant speck of cerulean blue in a universe of incomprehensible scale.
I was shielded from the lack of atmosphere by the understanding I was only dreaming. And I zoomed through the solar system and galaxy at a meteoric speed. By the time my feet touched down on the surface of another planet, the home I’d known had vanished into a void completely.
Nebulae whirled and twirled overhead as I stood fixed at the center of everything. Shooting stars of varying hues ripped and streamed and flared across the sprawling sky. I watched the cosmic turntable slowly revolve as I let out an ephemeral sigh. It emerged soundlessly and floated off into the alien night.
When I woke, the galaxy I’d just flown through collapsed into nothing but cotton sheets and the droning hum of an air conditioner. But as I opened my eyes again and began processing the experience, the day felt brighter and my fears a little lighter.
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My rare lucid dreams are usually a rewrite/rerun of a scary/deadly dream. One that I must survive, and do through the rework.