Run Forrest Run

Run Forrest, run!

For me, there was a watershed event that really got the ball rolling on this thing I just call “the search”.

In 2010 a combination of severe rheumatoid arthritis attack, and a ruptured vein in my brain left me in intensive care and then convalescing and ingesting over a dozen medications a day. For long periods I was almost immobile and I was continuously in some level of pain. Sometimes it was totally debilitating. During a vacation months later in and around Las Vegas it was so bad that I spent time at the Las Vegas blackjack tables in a wheel chair.

Eventually the mixture of drugs, especially heavy daily doses of steroids, left me unable to sleep. For a period of 6 days it was so severe that not only did I not go to sleep, I didn't even go through the motions of getting into bed. Although I have been told it isn't possible, I slept not once for 6 straight days. During that period, after a day or so of watching TV, I found that I couldn't stand the “mental noise” television would cause me, so at 2am I retired to the living room, built a fire and started to read.

Over the 6 days of non-sleep I read something like ten books. After the 6 day period my sleeping habit returned to a point, however I found that I could still only sleep 2-4 hours a night. During those hours I was awake I took medication to reduce my pain and continued to read. Like a literary Forrest Gump, once I started to read, I didn't know where to stop, so I continued on as one book lead to another through bibliographies and logical trains of thought. I read nearly 100 books in the first couple months.

Interestingly for the first day or two of this reading binge I decided to read about something I recently lacked: sleep, and dreaming. After learning about the various phases of sleep, and types and quality of dreaming I happened upon a vaguely familiar term: lucid dreaming. The familiarity stemmed from the fact that over the years, I had occasional instances where during the course of a dream, I mentally realized I was dreaming. I have subsequently learned and experienced many deep lucid dreaming episodes, and will review more on that separately. It turns out that Lucid dreaming is not only a substantial area of clinical physiological and psychological study, it is considered by some as a doorway to amazing things including shamanic practices like shape shifting and even out of body travel.

Many people I had spoken to about my lucid dreaming had told me it was impossible to become fully aware of dreaming, while dreaming. There were even some in the science and medical community that denied the possibility entirely. But I know differently. I've had personal first-hand experience to the contrary.

So having personal knowledge of something that some in science told me was impossible, it seemed to be reasonable to spend some time to investigate further. My personal experience with lucid dreaming caused me to realize that science didn't have the last word in some cases. What I knew as fact was, according to some scientists, impossible. This was my first real indication that science needed to be treated as a possibility or even a probability, but not an absolute given. So I decided to continue my attempt to discover how far down this rabbit hole goes.

I'll have MUCH more to say about lucid dreaming, but for now let's just consider it as a catalyst for change for me: as the basis for suspending my almost total dedication to science as the arbiter of what was or wasn't “real”.

Perhaps I had stumbled upon a doorway to impossible things. After-all, what else was I going to do all night long? Count sheep? (by the way I tried that, and it didn't work).