#50. Dreams That Break The Rules

So throughout my years I’ve lived among some people who had more than a passing interest in consciousness, and they introduced me to multiple areas of study, mostly surrounding the mystical side.  One of the things we would talk about is dreams, and eventually I discovered many people believe there are a lot of unbreakable rules in dreams, and challenging these concepts are good ways to discover whether or not you are lucid dreaming.  One that I once used myself, was the clock-face rule.  Apparently you can’t read clocks in your dreams.  The way it happened to me, I was dreaming I was in a house I knew my sister owned in the dream but the house wasn’t her real house.  My family was running around though.  I asked what year it was, they said it was two years later than I thought it was.  Maybe it was the jet-lag I was suffering at the time, but I generally don’t lucid dream.  This time, however, I caught the glimmer of a possibility that I might be dreaming, and I thought of the clock-face rule.  I looked at a round clock face and it was like the glass was focusing the light down until the face was a small oblong mass in the lower right of the glass.  I couldn’t read it.  So I looked around, and saw the clock on the microwave.  I could read one number at a time, but when I moved my sight to the next digit I could tell the first number changed.  I couldn’t read it.  And I woke up.  Another one is to mess with a light switch.  I remember this from a strange documentary-type film called “Waking Life.”  Apparently, the mind can’t change environmental things like light levels in dreams.  Flicking the switch will cause no change.  Another common one is best described with your typical “falling” dream.  You wake up just before you hit the ground, because (allegedly) you can’t die in your dreams.  That’s the line that apparently get’s blurrier than normal in my mind. I’ll elaborate in part 2.