around a turning cylinder, slowly lifting the bed. I wasn't
aware
that I was imagining these ropes until I began to worry that one rope would catch on
the other rope, and they wouldn't wind up smoothly. But I said, internally, "Oh, the tension will take care of that," and this interrupted the first
thought I was having, and made me aware that I was thinking of t wo things at once.
I also noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas continue, but they become less and less logically interconnected. You don't
notice
that they're not
logically connected until you ask yourself, "What made me think of that?" and you try to work your way back, and often you can't remember what
the hell
did
make you think of that!
So you get every
illusion
of logical connection, but the actual fact is that the thoughts become more and more cockeyed until they're completely
disjointed, and beyond that, you fall asleep.
After four weeks of sleeping all the time, I wrote my theme, and explained the observations I had made. At the end of the theme I pointed out
that all of these observations were made while I was
watching
myself fall asleep, and I don't really know what it's like to fall asleep when I'm not
watching myself. I concluded the theme with a little verse I made up, which pointed out this problem of introspection:
I wonder why. I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder!
We hand in our themes, and the next time our class meets, the professor reads one of them: "Mum bum wugga mum bum . . ." I can't tell what
the guy wrote.
He reads another theme: "Mugga wugga mum bum wugga wugga. . ." I don't know what that guy wrote either, but at the end of it, he goes:
Uh wugga wuh. Uh wugga wuh
Uh wugga wugga wugga.
I wugga wuh uh wugga wuh
Uh wugga wugga wugga.
"Aha!" I say. "That's
m y
theme!" I honestly didn't recognize it until the end.
After I had written the theme I continued to be curious, and I kept practicing this watching myself as I went to sleep. One night, while I was
having a dream, I realized I was observing myself
in
the dream. I had gotten all the way down into the sleep itself!
In the first part of the dream I'm on top of a train and we're approaching a tunnel. I get scared, pull myself down, and we go into the tunnel--
whoosh! I say to myself, "So you can get the feeling of fear, and you can hear the sound change when you go into the tunnel."
I also noticed that I could see colors. Some people had said that you dream in black and white, but no, I was dreaming in color.
By this time I was inside one of the train cars, and I can feel the train lurching about. I say to myself, "So you can get kinesthetic feelings in a
dream." I walk with some difficulty down to the end of the car, and I see a big window, like a store window. Behind it there are-not mannequins, but
three live girls in bathing suits, and they look pretty good!
I continue walking into the next car, hanging onto the straps overhead as I go, when I say to myself, "Hey! It would be interesting to get excited--
sexually--so I think I'll go back into the other car." I discovered that I could turn around, and walk back through the t rain--I could control the
direction of my dream. I get back to the car with the special window, and I see three old guys playing violins--but they turned back into girls! So I
could modify the direction of my dream, but not perfectly.
Well, I began to get excited, intellectually as well as sexually, saying things like, "Wow! It's working!" and I woke up.
I made some other observations while dreaming. Apart from always asking myself, "Am I
really
dreaming in color?" I wondered, "How
accurately do you see something?"
The next time I had a dream, there was a girl lying in tall grass, and she had red hair. I tried to see if I could see
each
hair. You know how there's
a little area of color just where the sun is reflecting--the diffraction effect, I could see
that
! I could see each hair as sharp as you want: perfect vision!
Another time I had a dream in which a thumbtack was stuck in a doorframe. I see the tack, run my fingers down the doorframe, and I feel the
tack. So the "seeing department" and the "feeling department" of the brain seem to be connected. Then I say to myself, Could it be that they
don't
have to be connected? I look at the doorframe again, and there's no thumbtack. I run my finger down the doorframe, and I
feel
the tack!
Another time I'm dreaming and I hear "knock-knock; knock-knock." Something was happening in the dream that made this knocking fit, but not
perfectly--it seemed sort of foreign. I thought: "Absolutely guaranteed that this knocking is coming from
outside
my dream, and I've invented this
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