DREAM

I'm biking up San Francisco hills even steeper than in the waking world. I bike all over, usually, but this route is exhausting--and scary.

I'm also distracted. I'm reviewing a report on the finances of a nonprofit whose board I'm on. I hear the report via hallucinatory voices--no earphones, just a ghostly virtual conference whispering behind the traffic noise. Fortunately for my biking, it's nearly all audio--a few faint images of charts do superimpose on the cars ahead, but I ignore them. They're not the problem.

Fear is. I'm not sure why, but the financial reports from certain divisions, particularly the women's group, fill me with unreasoning terror. I check with other board members and find I'm not alone--they're panicking too! I tell myself "There's no reason for this!" and the fear eases a bit--but persists. Whatever this is, it's clingy.

And spready. Now even the program that displays the data terrifies us all! But it only created a virtual bare white room and projected graphs on the walls. What's so scary? A couple of board members say "it triggered memories of imprisonment and isolation"--they were war prisoners, and the enemy did try to break them with sensory deprivation in rooms a little like that. But not much like, and this is virtual--sketchy. Besides, I was no prisoner, yet I feel the fear.

The display program has more of a sense of humor than most software; it notices my panic is peculiar, and reconfigures the room into a dentist's waiting room, and asks sarcastically "does THIS fill you with terror, too? The magazines", the program proudly points out, "are the dullest in history. They're all about accounting as a career! And if bean-counting doesn't terrify you, you can always worry about your teeeeeeth."

Point taken. The traffic on this hill street, a bare room, dentists, and a financial summary are just not inherently horrific, any more than dull magazines should be. Something irrational's going on!

But what? And why?

AWAKE

The moment I wake it's obvious it isn't panic but fever--sweats, chills and an adrenaline rush. Symptoms of this recurring fever I get (so far undiagnosed, though it responds to antibiotics). Yet in my dream, the self experiencing these familiar symptoms was blind to the pattern! Seems like my dream-ego, usually called the "conscious" self, isn't so conscious after all. Stupid, in fact.

Yet the composer of the dream not only incorporated the sweats, chills & racing heart, it seemed aware the cause wasn't fear but illness. The scriptwriter even intrudes in the dream as a character--the snarky display program, openly annoyed with the "conscious" mind's blindness to the obvious answer--a flare-up of fever.

So here's a riddle for you lucid-dream fans: does this qualify? If a part of you other than the 'I' in the dream figures out you're dreaming... is the dream lucid?

Who dreams a dream? The viewer, or the scriptwriter?

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