The Problem with Movies

The problem with movies is that it seems to be the only creative frame of reference for anyone attempting to imagine a concept or incident outside their sphere of experience. So when I say things like, "I have nested dreams," or "I've learned to control one or two things about my dreams," the only thing people have to relate to (unless they dream like I do) is their time spent watching a movie. In this case, it's always the same movie: Inception.

My dreams are not like Inception. If the way I dreamed were to be turned into a movie, nobody would go to it and everyone who did go would hate it. Hate it.

I have always had vivid, intense dreams. More often than not, something whimsical and clearly fantastic happens in them so that there is never a question of whether I am awake or asleep. If Tinkerbell arrives while I'm pulling weeds at my parents' house and hands me a Mickey Mouse alarm clock that dispenses pixie dust and proceeds to tell me that I'm wanted on Mount Olympus for a dinner honoring Mercury, then I am reasonably certain that I'm dreaming. When I continue, in that situation, to shake pixie dust on my head and lift off the ground to fly over the world, then I know I'm dreaming. (Actual dream, by the way.)

But starting when I was about ten, the simplicity of determining what was dream and what was real became, well, difficult. It began with a nightmare. I have a few scattered mental images of what that nightmare was about, but don't remember it in its entirety. This is deliberate. That dream was one of the most traumatizing nightmares of my entire life, and it took me two years of devising and employing mental exercises in order to paper over the memories and eventually forget the dream. This lengthy endeavor opened the door to a simple thought: that the possibility existed for me to have some measure of control over what goes on in my head. If I could, through persistence and practice, eliminate the memory of a dream and coach myself away from dreaming about it again, then perhaps I could instigate some changes in the dreams themselves.

The possibility may exist, but taking advantage of it is something else entirely. After years of practice I have very, very limited "control" over some of the things that happen. It also seems that my dream-mind prefers that my conscious mind not interfere and so devises new ways to trick my conscious mind into thinking that I'm not really dreaming. This last point is what leads to "nested" dreams.

Here. Imagine, if you will, this scenario:

You work a schedule that prevents you from sleeping with your spouse at night together in your bed and instead has you returning home to kiss your spouse goodbye for the day as you prepare to sleep for the next eight hours and your spouse departs for a day at work. You find it easier to sleep on the couch and comfortably curl up there and listen for the front door to announce to you that your spouse has indeed quitted the house and you are alone. More than anything, you're waiting to hear the deadbolt click into place so that you can rest a little easier knowing burglars will first have to pick the lock or bypass the deadbolt in some other fashion.

Waiting seems interminable and you hear a sound, but it's not the deadbolt locking. You get up to investigate and at the top of the stairs see that your spouse is crouching at the front door trying to stare out the lock on the door handle. "We have a peephole, sweetheart," you proceed to say. Spouse leaps from his position and bounds up the stairs to tell you he thinks there's a felon walking down the street. Naturally, you call the police and are engaged in answering the dispatcher's questions when a sudden noises startles you and you wake to find you're on the couch, waiting to hear if the deadbolt has fastened.

It was a dream. And from the sounds of it, your spouse has left for work. You don't remember hearing the deadbolt fasten, but that is more indicative of you falling asleep before your spouse reached the front door than of him forgetting to lock the door. You check your phone to see if Spouse has texted you. He hasn't. But a moment later your phone lights up and . . . it's someone from work. They're wondering if you can cover a shift for them tomorrow. You want to yell at them for waking you up after you've just got off a grave, but that won't help matters much. Just as you go to text them back, you realize that the sound of the clock ticking has vanished. You know this to be a sign that you're not awake anymore. You look for more signs. You can't hear yourself breathe. The texture of the blanket is wrong. When you get up, the carpet doesn't feel like carpet. This must be a dream.

You fight out of the dream and are once again on the couch, phone in hand, Spouse presumably out the door. You check the phone, for real this time, and there are no new messages. You should probably just put the phone away and go to sleep, but you like to know that Spouse makes it to work without getting in a traffic accident. So you roll over, put your arm over your eyes, and get ready to doze—

Something isn't right again. You're used to the feel of your arm on your eyelids and the real feeling of it is missing. You lift it off and turn over. Things are still not right. The blanket is supposed to smell like the dryer sheets and it doesn't smell like anything. And there's a rustling sound that doesn't match anything you can see. 

You fight awake again. Are you awake? There's someone at the door. You can hear them knocking. But you're not sure you're awake. Things seem right. The sun has moved. The clock is ticking. You smell the blankets. . . . They still don't smell. You rub your eyes. Your left eye doesn't stab painfully the way it's supposed to (souvenir of the most absurd paper-cut accident ever). Clearly you're not really awake. 

But now it's a fight between your conscious and subconscious minds. The subconscious fights to convince you you're awake when you're really asleep. The conscious fights to wake you out of a false state of wakefulness. 

This, this backing and forthing and testing and trying and never being sure is how I spend most of my nights. 

Well, say some, in Inception they have those totems to help them tell if they're dreaming. Not so simple. There's never any one reliable factor that indicates conclusively to me that I'm awake or dreaming. I have to add things up and make sure analytically that things fit together. It's the only way.

Well, say others, in Inception if you die in the dream world you wake up! Not that simple. I once dreamed that I was being shot in the head every hour on the hour. I didn't wake up.

Well, they say, in Inception they blah blah blah blah . . . .

Wait. This must be a dream.