Vivid Dreams

Last night I had a very vivid dream. I haven't had one that vivid or that lengthy in some time. I was listening to a podcast yesterday that discussed dreams and lucid dreams and I wonder if that caused it. I also wonder if being sick or getting healthy were factors.... or if it was just one of those things.

It wasn't a lucid dream, just very detailed. I was at my middle school, but, you know, it didn't look like my middle school... that sort of thing. I'm not sure why, but I was looking for extra shoes at one point for my cross country team. I found my principal and he told me that all the donated shoes were kept in the crawlspace under the gym. I went to investigate. Nothing weird happened in this dream really, it was just detailed and vivid. At one point I found the PE teacher's office and it had a huge basket of candy bars on it. The snickers bar, though, had M & M packaging. There are lot so other details like that I remember.

In college I became interested in dreams after watching Waking Life. If you haven't seen it, you should check it out. In one of my art classes they challenged us to try to find inspiration from our dreams by keeping a dream journal. We wrote down and snippet and drew out any imagery we remembered from the dreams. It worked. I began remembering more and more of the dreams. I could remember multiple dreams a night in full and complete detail. I could remember the feelings, the scenery, the smells... everything. I even had one or two lucid dreams that didn't last too long. It was interesting, but it became too much. I would wake up without feeling like a slept at all. It felt like I had been awake all night because of all the dreams. They were so vivid I can remember them in detail even today. I decided I had to stop and give it up.

I later met an artists who had lucid dreams every, single night! His work was all bout the characters and places in his dream world. I sounded amazing, but he assured me it wasn't so great. He was exhausted. He couldn't help but have these dreams, There are lots of people out there who actively try to lucid dream and can't. Meanwhile, he couldn't stop, even if he wanted to.

I have heard of different techniques to recognize if you are in a dream or not. Some people knock on doors constantly and say, "Am I dreaming?" When they finally are dreaming and try to knock on a door in a dream, their hand goes through it or something else strange happens. I have also read that light switches may n ot work in dreams and that electric clocks look scrambled.

I am wondering if I should get back into dreams and actively seek them again. I think it could be interesting and right now I am trying to break my normal routines and add some new factors into my life. Maybe dreams could be one of those things.