#2 -- SleepyTime

The shad is a curious fish. Hailing from the herring family clupeidae, it spends the majority of its life in saltwater, yet migrates back to freshwater to spawn. Such types of fish are rare, but not entirely unheard of, and Scientist have agreed to classify them as anadrmous fish. Shad are found on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean as well as, to a much lesser extent, parts of the Mediterranean.

Unfortunately, due to overfishing, extensive pollution, and the construction of dams that inhibit migration patterns, certain areas in North America were dangerously close to losing their shad populations by the late twentieth century. One such freshwater mating sanctuary in jeopardy was the Potomac River, near which my elementary school is built.

Westbrook Elementary, liberal and environmentally conscious that it is, partook in a program in which every year, the fourth grade class would raise shad eggs to their infantile state—shad fry being the proper nomenclature—and then release them into a safe spot of the Potomac. There, they would be able to grow to adulthood and return to the Atlantic. The Westbrook Elementary PTA also pledged its support to various fish ladder initiatives, which called for the installation of dorky little devices in dams up which the shad could flop, and then continue to swim, upstream to their mating grounds. Naturally, I took part in this program.

Thanks to Westbrook Elementary school’s efforts, combined in part with increased shad awareness and legislative protection from overfishing and pollution, the shad are making a promising comeback. So successful is their rehabilitation that fishing regulations have been loosened in the past year with the understanding that more fish can be harvested and still the shad community will remain a viable part of the ecosystem. Think of it as moving from Orange Alert for fish to whatever the color equivalent of Not About To Become Extinct is.

What I am trying to say here, I guess, is that lucid dreaming is much easier to do than reviving the shad population of the northern Potomac River from near annihilation, and yet I still Do Not Fucking Get It.

Somehow, I am doing this wrong.

First and foremost, let’s go over exactly what lucid dreaming is so that we are all on the same page. Lucid dreaming is essentially knowing you are dreaming when you are dreaming. You can either seamlessly lapse from a waking state right into REM, or begin dreaming normally and become cognizant that you are in fact in your own brain somewhere in the duration of the dream. Another type of lucid dreaming is sleep paralysis in which your body stays immobile and shut down for REM sleep, but some small portion of you mentally wakes up and crazy dream hallucinations hop around your own bedroom.* From there, you can do whatever you want in an unhindered expanses of your own imagination or buzzing neurosynapses** or whatever until you wake up.

What! That is awesome! How cool is that! Literally nothing is cooler!

Apparently, anyone can lucid dream, it just takes some practice and mental preparation. For starters, you’re supposed to focus on your desire to lucid dream right before you fall asleep and sharpen your dream recall skills. Staying out of sync with a normal sleep cycle and sleeping in the middle of the day helps achieve this. Check. I have 9am class four days a week (because I am an idiot who clearly cannot schedule), so lately I’ve been scheduling a few hours in the middle of my day, usually 10am-noon and 3pm-5pm, for sleeping and setting timers so that I’ll wake up at odd intervals and hopefully better remember what I’ve been dreaming.

The fact that I have designated certain napping blocks in my day in the grander scheme of organizing my time for maximum efficiency and sharpening my dream-recall skills is attributed to the reality that I have never been chill a goddamn day of my life.

 

The Dude abides (?)

Essentially, I am doing everything right. My dream recall is awesome. In the past few weeks, I have had a handful of instances in which I’ve really been cognizant that I am dreaming while dreaming. You did it!, you are saying. You are really something!, you are saying. You are correct, of course, but there is still a bit of a problem. The real problem is that the content of my dreams is hands down The Worst. For reasons unbeknownst to me, I keep dreaming in Star Wars video games. For three consecutive weekday naps, now. As long as I want to stay lucid in my dreams, I have to play these dumb fucking video games. I love video games! This should be a reward! But it’s not because all of the levels are Clone Wars era plotlines and I can’t skip any of those stupid exposition videos that you have to watch before you go into the next level or fight a boss or whatever. Whatever the equivalent of pressing X to skip ahead is in my unconscious head is, I am yet to discover it.

Also, I’m pretty sure my mind is working against me to keep me in these Clone Wars dreams as long as possible, because even though it seems to have exhausted all of my knowledge of the newer*** Star Wars films, it refuses to let me move on to A New Hope or anything good from the original trilogy. I am trying SO HARD to play as a snow speeder and do the cable-wrap-around thing on the ATATs on Hoth, but instead my brain insists on making up characters from the Clone War era by mashing together remotely Star Wars things and Muppets**** from all corners of my memory. Come on, Subconscious Me, you can do better than that.  

Nope. Try again, brain.

  

I swear, if I have to sit through one more congressional congress on Coruscant, I’m going to punch Count Dooku in the dick.

Well either way, I’m going to give it about another week before I start snorting whatever Alzheimer’s medication it is that amps up the FancyFunNeurotransmitter***** that will let me play the videogames that I actually want to in my dreams. Or hop around Escher paintings and Dali landscapes. Or have a Native American shaman conjure wolfshadows up and down my dorm room walls. Or swim in the sky with SunDolphins above New Dehli. Because really, is that so much to ask?

Today I had eggs for lunch.  

*I wasn’t aware that sleep paralysis was a thing until about a month ago, but it explains The Most Terrifying Nightmare that I had when I was a kid, in which a werewolf-swamp-monster thing followed me out of my dream and sat on my bedside table waiting for me to fall asleep again while telling me it was going to eat out my eyeballs but only after it was done killing my parents in front of me. Normal dreams from a normal childhood.

** I am clearly majoring in the humanities.

*** read: shittier

**** no I don’t get it either.

***** a film major, to be exact.