In the first part of the dream I’m on top of a train and we’re approaching a tunnel. I get scared, pull myself down, and we go into the tunnel—whoosh! I say to myself, “So you can get the feeling of fear, and you can hear the sound change when you go into the tunnel.”
I also noticed that I could see colors. Some people had said that you dream in black and white, but no, I was dreaming in color.
By this time I was inside one of the train cars, and I can feel the train lurching about. I say to myself, “So you can get kinesthetic feelings in a dream.” I walk with some difficulty down to the end of the car, and I see a big window, like a store window. Behind it there are-not mannequins, but three live girls in bathing suits, and they look pretty good!
I continue walking into the next car, hanging onto the straps overhead as I go, when I say to myself, “Hey! It would be interesting to get excited—sexually—so I think I’ll go back into the other car.” I discovered that I could turn around, and walk back through the train—I could control the direction of my dream. I get back to the car with the special window, and I see three old guys playing violins—but they turned back into girls! So I could modify the direction of my dream, but not perfectly.
Well, I began to get excited, intellectually as well as sexually, saying things like, “Wow! It’s working!” and I woke up.
I made some other observations while dreaming. Apart from always asking myself, “Am I
The next time I had a dream, there was a girl lying in tall grass, and she had red hair. I tried to see if I could see
Another time I had a dream in which a thumbtack was stuck in a doorframe. I see the tack, run my fingers down the doorframe, and I feel the tack. So the “seeing department” and the “feeling department” of the brain seem to be connected. Then I say to myself, Could it be that they
Another time I’m dreaming and I hear “knock-knock; knock-knock.” Something was happening in the dream that made this knocking fit, but not perfectly—it seemed sort of foreign. I thought: “Absolutely guaranteed that this knocking is coming from
The knocking is still going, I wake up, and … Dead silence. There was nothing. So it wasn’t connected to the outside.
Other people have told me that they have incorporated external noises into their dreams, but when I had this experience, carefully “watching from below,” and
During the time of making observations in my dreams, the process of waking up was a rather fearful one. As you’re beginning to wake up there’s a moment when you feel rigid and tied down, or underneath many layers of cotton batting. It’s hard to explain, but there’s a moment when you get the feeling you can’t get out; you’re not sure you can wake up. So I would have to tell myself—after I was awake—that that’s ridiculous. There’s no disease I know of where a person falls asleep naturally and can’t wake up. You can
You might like to know how this process of observing my dreams stopped (which it has for the most part; it’s happened just a few times since). I’m dreaming one night as usual, making observations, and I see on the wall in front of me a pennant. I answer for the twenty-fifth time, “Yes, I’m dreaming in color,” and then I realize that I’ve been sleeping with the back of my head against a brass rod. I put my hand behind my head and I feel that the back of my head is
When I woke up later, there was no brass rod, nor was the back of my head soft. Somehow I had become tired of making these observations, and my brain had invented some false reasons as to why I shouldn’t do it any more.
