From: coordinator@mermin-wedgwood.site
To: group-89r3mo-distro@mermin-wedgwood.site
Hello and an early welcome to our guests for the upcoming instance of the Mermin-Wedgwood on-site experience! We are very excited to have you all and look forward to your imminent arrival. You will recieve a full orientation package in a separate email shortly, but just to get things started we like to ask a question as an icebreaker/warm-up.
The question for today is: how do you experience dreams? Do you dream in color or black and white? What language(s) do you dream in? Do you smell and/or taste in your dreams? Do you look like you do in daily life? What about lucidity? Feel free to answer with as much or as little detail as you'd like, but more detail is better!
Reply-All From: liv@livmansfieldmakescomics.com
Does anybody under age 70 dream in black and white? I think the whole "dreaming in color is exceptional" thing was a relic of the mid-20th-century when everyone was watching black-and-white TV. It's not like seeing in black and white is natural, it was entirely the result of a few specific technologies.
So yeah, I dream in color like everybody else. And I dream in English. I speak a little Italian and once in a while someone in a dream will say something in Italian, but it's notable when it happens. I don't really smell or taste things and I don't really hear things except when someone says something, and even then it's more like the phrase popping into my head than hearing it with my ears. What I look like? I've looked basically the same since I was a teenager except for, you know, aging, and I'm not spending my time in dreams checking for crow's feet in the mirror.
Not sure what "lucidity" means here.
Reply-All from: mcmahan.bradley@hancockuniversity.edu
I can only see blue, yellow, and green. Everything else looks black and white. That's in real life but also in dreams. And I smell a lot in dreams. I guess I look like me, sometimes I dream I'm even more jacked.
Reply-All from: malory.irving@hancockuniversity.edu
Lucid dreaming.
Reply-All from: macaulay.diana@hancockuniversity.edu
"even more jacked" Brad RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT :P
Reply-All from: heathmalory@kingdomofgains.fitness
I dream in color but it's usually dark in my dreams, so the colors are muted.
Reply-All from: macaulay.diana@hancockuniversity.edu
What's lucid dreaming?
Reply-All from: mcmahan.bradley@hancockuniversity.edu
is google broken?
Reply-All from: liv@livmansfieldmakescomics.com
Can we stop it with the one-line reply-alls? Or move them to a group chat?
From: heathmalory@kingdomofgains.fitness
To: liv@livmansfieldmakescomics.com
You are absolutely right, that was getting really annoying! I'll set up a WhatsApp group for everyone. Can I have your phone number? Irving is my little brother and the other two kids replying on the chain are his friends from college so I have their contact info already.
From: liv@livmansfieldmakescomics.com
To: heathmalory@kingdomofgains.fitness
I don't have WhatsApp, just start a group text. My phone number is 555-555-5555.
From: heathmalory@kingdomofgains.fitness
To: liv@livmansfieldmakescomics.com
Great point! That's a good idea, I'll just do a group text. By the way, I hope it's not weird to mention this but I really loved Cockled Shores.
Reply-All from: malory.irving@hancockuniversity.edu
Lucid dreaming means the ability to be aware that you're dreaming while you're in a dream and to more or less control what happens.
There are different levels of lucidity and I've experienced many of them.
Total lucidity would be where you're controlling every single thing that happens in the dream, almost like you're directing it. Like if you decide you want a giant purple dragon to appear, you could make that happen. I have come close to this but never gotten total control. Like I'll think, OK, I'm dreaming, I want to fly to Japan and I'll keep flying over the ocean but I can't ever make it to Japan.
The more common type of lucidity is where you know you're dreaming and you control your own actions and choices based on the knowledge that you're dreaming. So that usually involves some abilities beyond what you have in normal waking life. This is where I'm usually at with lucid dreams. I can usually fly, and at the moment I become lucid I'll go oh right, this is a dream, I can fly and just do it. But I can't just teleport to the middle of Las Vegas or make a Siberian tiger appear.
The sub-lucid levels are where you're not aware you're dreaming. Sometimes what I'll experience on these levels is a tugging-at-my-consciousness sensation, like something isn't right but I'm not sure what. Usually if the circumstances in the dream are different from my real life circumstances. Like if I have a dream where I'm back in high school, part of me will be thinking, wait, didn't I graduate? I'm pretty sure I'm in college now, why do I have to do this? But I won't realize I'm dreaming, and my brain will come up with some explanation like "it turned out I didn't have enough credits to graduate after all."
Somes I'm myself in dreams and sometimes I'm someone completely different. Like I'm playing a character. I might be a little kid or an old lady or a guy my age but who's not me.
Even when I'm totally submerged and non-lucid in a dream and just accepting the world of the dream for what it is, it feels different from waking life. There's a fuzziness to it. And when I wake up it's really obvious looking back that the dream was a dream, like the difference between what things look like with my glasses on vs off. But when I'm in it, it's harder to notice the fuzziness.
Or more like, I notice the fuzziness, but I forget that there's a world where things aren't fuzzy like that. I'll be thinking, is this real? And trying to focus hard on a blade of grass or the texture of a piece of paper in order to convince myself it's all real. And in that moment in the dream, I forget that when I'm awake, I don't ever have to do that. When I'm awake, I'm not staring at a crack in the wall trying to decide if it's solid or a figment of my subconscious.
Reply-All From: liv@livmansfieldmakescomics.com
Damn kid.
OK, thanks for the explanation, that was genuinely helpful.
I don't think I've ever experienced lucid dreaming. I'm always some version of myself in dreams but I'll have those different circumstances like "I'm in a play and never learned the lines" or "I have to go back and take an exam I missed in college" or "I have to babysit this child and I have no idea where the parents are" and I always just accept whatever the circumstances are without thinking about it. It's only after I wake up that I think "it was a dream." It does make me wonder sometimes if I'm dreaming when I'm (probably?) not, but I try not to go down that road. That way madness lies.