How to Make Your Dreams Weird (Maybe)

Apparently some other people don't have dreams that are weird self-aware metatextual narratives, often drawing from a cast of stock characters, as if they were scripted by a drunken Osamu Tezuka. For those who wish to change this, I have helpfully written a short guide to achieving it. Or anyway, the stuff I do/have done that might be related.

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1) Have a period of about a year and a half in which you're really into lucid dreaming.

(Disclaimer: I do not endorse all of the Lucidity Institute's ideas. For instance: The one about going to their seminar in Hawaii and doing "dream yoga". It is my opinion that yoga is an activity most safely and fruitfully engaged in while awake.)

This involves doing things like keeping a little card in your wallet that reminds you to check whether you're dreaming. The idea is that once you get into this habit, you'll start doing it in your dreams, too. It does, in fact, really work that way - I did it for the first time after about two weeks, I think.

But sometimes you will go, "Oh, I get in duels with this space orangutan all the time, there's nothing weird about it - I must be awake." And then you wake up annoyed with yourself. I mean, in real life my relations with space orangutans have always been perfectly cordial!

I no longer do the reality-check exercises, but the majority of my dreams are still what I would call semi-lucid at least part of the time. I rarely think "I'm dreaming," because it doesn't occur to me to analyze what's going on on that level, but I would say that I'm generally analyzing and editing on some level. The really storylike dreams - the ones I post here - are usually of a kind where I'm in an especially editorial role and somewhat detached from the action.

I tend to be considering who the "protagonist" of the dream is at any given time and switching my viewpoint accordingly. And I'm not often entirely "in character"; I was Runner for a lot of his dream, and the Monkey for most of hers, but I was simultaneously kind off to the side criticizing their decisions to myself. (Atypically, I was never Deathle or Zone in the Ten no SINzou dream; just the cyborg woman with the gun, very briefly. The rest was kind of a flashback sequence I was watching or a TV Tropes article I was reading/editing.)

In my more normal dreams - anxiety dreams about airports or school, dreams where I'm just shopping or something, etc. - I usually stick to the same viewpoint the whole time, and my decisions are more immediate and more clearly my own. Also, I'm very rarely anyone other than myself in those dreams.

2) For the duration of the lucid-dreaming-obsessed period, write down all your dreams. I don't know if it's necessary that you use a pretty overpriced notebook purchased from Barnes and Noble that says "Night Dreams" on one side and when you flip it over "Day Dreams" on the other. It's possible, though.

3) Play a lot of video games and watch very little TV.

Okay, I have no evidence that this is actually related. However: Allegedly the people-dreaming-only-in-black-and-white thing is largely confined to those who were raised with black-and-white televisions in their homes. When color came along, the effect went away.

So maybe the format of the narratives we consume somehow affects the format of our dreams. If so, then it seems reasonable that video games, in which the consumer plays an active role in deciding the direction of the narrative (or, you know, at least in the direction the character's walking), would do something different to the brain than television and movies, which are more passive mediums.

I don't know how changeable this is later in life; for me, definitely somewhat. I've found that changing what sorts of stories I'm consuming changes the format of my dreams - if I'm playing a lot of Disgaea, my dream-people are likely to have bars over their heads showing how close they are to death, and the boring parts of conversations turn skippable. If I've been reading a lot of bad paranormal romances, settings turn very sketchy and, uh, the guys are all creepy alpha males or magical serial killers. (Paranormal romances, why do I keep reading you.) I don't want to discuss what happened when I watched Yami no Matsuei, but explosions of flowers were involved. And while not technically a narrative, heavy Second Life use makes for bad texturing, lamps that are just a cone on top of an orb, and John Norman references. (...maybe I make bad choices just in general.)

4) Eat chocolate right before bed. This goes back to the bad choices thing.

5) Work on your YA novel about Dark Lords right before bed and fall asleep brooding over it.

This is actually probably the most obvious explanation for the whole thing.