Thursday, March 13, 2008

if only.

I used to be fascinated with the idea of lucid dreaming - I had a friend in L.A. 15 years ago who avidly practiced lucid dreaming, explaining how to recognize "signposts" and try to work with them. Signposts are when you're in a familiar environment with unfamiliar elements, like you're walking down your street and suddenly your childhood pet is walking beside you, usually chatting. (Personally, I often get John Krasinski walking beside me, usually chatting. And I tend to just go with it, rather than trying to change things in any way.) But you're supposed to then say to yourself, hey! Spot isn't around anymore, and I don't remember him talking, so this must be a DREAM. And then you can run around and lift cars, or fly, or whatever.

But I really haven't thought about lucid dreaming in years, so last night was sort of a surprise. I was dreaming about a cake delivery (which isn't unusual, sadly), and I had been running a lot of errands and was running late. I was gilding the edges of the cake, looked at the clock and realized I had to be in San Francisco in 45 minutes (easily an hour and a half away). I stopped everything I was doing, took a deep breath, and turned the hands of the clock back by a couple of hours. This is a dream, I thought, so I can totally do this. And everything was instantly fine.