If I had been more awake, I might have seen it. Sleep has taken me.
No, it is not sleep itself. Or is it?
Let me explain myself while there is still time. This began with my
experiments in lucid dreaming, a practice I took up for the amusement of
it more than any more rational motivation. Lucid dreaming is a simple
enough practice, but for myself I decided to use artificial aids. Doing
some research online I settled on a regimine of Galantamine starting at
4mg per day and escalating up to 30mg slowly over the course of several
months in addition to 5-HTP as a general sleeping aid.
At first the benefits were obvious: I was slowly finding my dreams
increasingly more vivid and my mild depression, a constant companion
throughout my adult life, began to lift.
My first real breakthrough occurred about 6 months after beginning my
experiments. I retired to bed early in the morning and closed my eyes,
finding myself fading into the dreamworld. What I saw was as surreal
as any other dream, but made ever more vivid by the chemical aids I had
ingested. I found myself floating without a body in an enormous black
abyss, the size of which I could feel was beyond description. Floating
through the abyss I witnessed strange overlapping geometric shapes which
appeared to my eyes impossible. This was the trigger that signalled to
my mind that I was in fact asleep and I was able to make this realisation
for the first time without awakening to mundane reality.
How funny is the effect of sleep upon the human brain. We dream things
that defy all logic and sense, and yet we accept them as real until
we awaken - for our brains are both actively generating the imagery
and yet paradoxically not active enough for our rational faculties to
realise that what is happening does not make sense. All my life I have
had dreams of this nature, as have you no doubt.
Lucidity alters things however - once one is lucid, the illogical is
noticed, and if one is skilled and practiced, it can be altered and
manipulated. It is possible to feel the joy of rising above the limits
reality places upon us, flying freely through the skies and exploring
memories of places and people long lost to the waking world. In the
dreamworld, reality is no prison.
It is amusing to me that scientific knowledge brings us to this state
more efficiently - this state in which the basic principals of logic
and the fundamental rules of reality are no more.
Perhaps I should instead say that it WAS amusing to me, for I no
longer wish to ever see that reality and dread the coming darkness of
sleep. Chemical stimulation holds it back only so long.
In that first lucid experience, upon realising that I was in a state of
sleep and dreaming I exerted my first true control over my reality and
summoned into being another geometric marvel which could not exist in the
waking world, unchained from the rules of Euclid of Alexandria. Describing
it is still a task that remains impossible, it is truly something one
can only understand through direct experience, though the elation of
surpassing such fundamental laws of reality is very much within the
grasp of the written word.
Though I am not a religious or spiritual man, what I felt can only be
described in those terms: a deep spiritual joy. In summoning something
so unnatural, I paradoxically felt I had begun to understand the hidden
aspects of nature itself, those higher dimensions that exist only in
theory were here exposed as very real indeed, and I felt this experience
was the highpoint of my life.
Of course there are still certain limits within the dreamworld, one of
which is that one must eventually awaken back to reality, and that is
what happened to me and ended my experience. Although the experience had
ended, I remained elated and chronicled the experience within my journal.
In my waking state I held no delusions about the nature of my experience:
though profound, it was still fundamentally a creation of my mind,
or so I assumed.
The human eye is naturally capable of perceiving a minute amount of the
electromagnetic spectrum: from 390 to 700nm without artificial aid. On top
of this limitation, we are capable of operating only within 4 dimensions:
3 spatial, 1 temporal. Not only are we incapable of perceiving more than
this directly, we are limited to certain environmental conditions: we
require an oxygen-rich atmosphere and an earth-like gravity if we are to
survive. Going beyond these limits is possible, but not by far. Astronauts
routinely experience environments in which gravity is weakened, though
still ever-present. We can use artificial aids to survive in oxygen-free
environments and we can even expand our perceptions by minute amounts
through the use of technology that translates the wider electromagnetic
spectrum into the narrow slice of it our eyes can perceive. There are
experiments which enable human beings to modify their retinas for the
perception of very slightly more of the EM spectrum, but still within
a minute portion of it.
When we look around our environment, our retinas respond to the
bombardment of photons bouncing off the world around us, photons which
due to their dualistic nature manifest as waveforms of a set wavelength
within the EM spectrum. We make use of our technology to detect radiation
outside of the visible portion, and we can use technology to glimpse at
projections of higher dimensions in much the same way as we routinely
create projections of 3D spatial topologies onto the 2D planes of the
average computer display - but we have no means to directly perceive
outside these limits.
I therefore assumed that my dream manifestation was a product of
imagination, for my mind could have no direct knowledge of higher
dimensional constructs and my brain contains no neural circuits capable of
processing them. Should anything exist that allows visible light to pass
through it while reflecting only higher wavelengths of the EM spectrum,
it will be invisible to human beings.
Such a being that reflects higher wavelengths only within higher
dimensional positions would also remain invisible to our technology.
We however would be both visible and vulnerable to such a being. A being
whose very existence we can only glimpse at from beneath the curtain of
sleep, if my experience is anything to go by.
It has been said that evolution is akin to an alien god - a force that
slowly over millenia transforms living beings, making them ever more
adapted to their environments, with no motivations and no intelligence
at work.
The alien god of evolution has used its power to create us and beings like
us - the animals and plants and microbes that populate our planet. All
life on earth is adapted to varying degrees to our planet.
One wonders what the alien god would create on other planets. For a start,
it would be unlikely to recreate DNA or any of the other fundamentals
of life on our earth.
Aliens, in other words, would truly be that: alien - truly alien,
perhaps in some ways beyond our comprehension.
You are most likely asking now why I take the time to explain this to
you. Allow me to explain.
First, what is the function of sleep? Sleep appears to hold two purposes:
it allows us to rest and heal, maintaining our body and our muscles,
and it also appears to allow our brains to organise the day's events for
storage into longterm memory. Dreams commonly consist of a mixture of
recently perceived events and thoughts and what appears to us to be random
nonsense, caused by the random activation of neurons while we sleep.
Dreams were created by the alien god of evolution so that we may adapt
better to life on our planet. But like many natural activities our
body drives us to, they can be hijacked. We have done this with food
and sex after all. The vast majority of acts of sexual intercourse
engaged in by humanity are for the purposes of pleasure alone, we make
use of contraceptives to deceive the alien god of evolution - using the
neural circuits that evolved to reward procreation while making actual
procreation unlikely or even impossible.
Perhaps it would be accurate to say that like recreational sex and junk
food, lucid dreaming is another way in which we have deceived the alien
god of evolution. No longer are my dreams bound to the purpose of encoding
memory or the simple random firing of my neurons.
A curious thing about our universe is the nature of randomness: it
only truly exists in the form of quantum-level events, the raw chaos of
subatomic particles in the quantum foam.
Naturally, one might wonder if there is an external source of that
chaos. If indeed our universe has more dimensions than we directly
perceive, is it not possible that what we call "external" is in fact
simply a higher-dimensional construct that we can not perceive?
If evolution as an alien god is simply metaphorical, what of the
possiblity of a true alien god? A creature of intelligence in those
higher dimensions, playing with the quantum foam for reasons unknown
and unfathomable to us.
If such a being exists, is it feasible that our dreams are in fact
directed to a purpose? Whatever purpose that may be, it is clear that
such a being would not want us to be aware of it, and it is this thought
that haunted me momentarily as I began my next session of lucid dreaming.
That night, pondering imagined greater beings I swallowed my pills and
lay down to sleep as normal. Sleep took me back to that great abyss of
geometric shapes unfathomable to my waking mind.
It was not until later upon analysing my dream that I noticed it: a
subtle movement amongst the shapes, just out of the corner of my eye,
a sort of distortion of the environment, moving with some purpose.
Being lucid I could still not control the motion of this thing, it
appeared to move entirely with its own purpose, beyond the control of
my dreaming brain.
I lost memory of this strange thing until further experiences manifested
in the same manner. Each time I lay down to sleep, I dreamt of more
control, and yet this thing in the distance remained beyond my will
to control.
Perhaps it was merely a suggestion upon pondering strange beings -
a thought that comforted me at first.
But then I awoke to see this thing in my waking reality, and it is with
me now as I write this and I sense a will behind it - a being with desire,
willing me to lay down again.
It grows increasingly more manipulative of my surroundings and I fear
that it is something that has somehow returned into my waking world from
the dreamworld.
The ground outside is increasingly blacker where this thing has been,
but the blackness seems to have depth - a depth that I can not describe,
for it is a black abyss which is beyond our normal spatial dimensions.
As my sanity slips, I increasingly feel an urge to sleep yet feel no
fatigue - I feel this thing pass through my mind and the urge increases.
I will myself to remain awake, but my will is slowly failing.
I must not sleep.