Ever since the age of six, I thought I would be a special person, a person with a unique and amazing ability. I just didn’t know, at first, what my ability would be. Meanwhile, everyone else, it seemed, even my parents and my brother, thought I was a fake. They just didn’t tell me so. But I wasn’t a fake, at least not eventually.
I understood the risk. I could become an egotist, a person whose high opinion of herself couldn’t be lowered in any way by reality. In addition to developing my amazing ability, I knew I had to work on my humility.
Eventually, I decided what my talent would be. I would be the first human being who could control her own dreams. I read everything I could find on the subject, and I started a journal in which, every morning, I wrote down what was in my dreams that night. I began to remember more and more. That’s the first step. It’s no use controlling your dreams if you don’t remember them after you wake up.
It’s relatively easy to say you can control your dreams when you are only predicting them. A little power of suggestion can have a large effect. If you plant the seed, the seed can grow. You say you’re going to dream about skydiving, and you imagine skydiving before you fall asleep, then you have increased the probability that you will dream about skydiving.
I didn’t want to predict my dreams; I wanted to control them. It’s the difference between saying you’re happy and actually being happy. Someone can always tell if you’re faking it.
Dream control (DC) is actually like a muscle than has atrophied. Our distant ancestors could do it. It’s possible that other animals can do it. It’s like yoga. At first you can’t stand on your head. You don’t have the strength or the balance. Eventually, however, discipline in maintaining the correct practice can lead to success without hurting yourself. I strove to strengthen my DC with daily concentration and practicing correct methods.
It took me years to find the correct methods. You try everything and see what results in the first sensations of a stronger muscle, and then more years to increase the strength of that muscle to the point where it was a useful part of my daily discipline, and I could rely on it to support my nightly flights. By the age of 48, I had trained my “Pegasus” to carry me as I slept wherever I wanted to go.
Dreams that occur during REM sleep are the brain trying to make sense of the sensations of synapses being refreshed. That’s the key. Know what synapses need to be refreshed. Manually refresh the areas that you’re not interested in. It’s not only memories; the brain also maps all parts of the body and all routines for living.
I know people think you invent things out of the blue in your dreams. That’s sort of true. If you see the back of someone’s head, you might think it’s someone you know, because you imagine the face, but the back of the head has to be there. You don’t dream things that aren’t there, at least in some way.
But there’s a lot to choose from. Everybody’s brain has all kinds of things in it, things you’ve experienced, things you’ve read, movies you’ve seen, even things you’ve imagined that don’t exist and things that violate the laws of physics. Some mornings I’d wake up and learn about things I’d forgotten. Some people think they have memories of past lives. I think it’s only things they’ve forgotten that they dream about.
Virginia, my best friend, didn’t believe me. Maybe I’m just fooling myself. Maybe everybody’s the same. Will human existence, like the existence of God, also be impossible to validate?
Monologues