Dream on

It started out innocently enough. My husband, J, and I were fooling around in bed, and things started to get hot and heavy. At the crucial moment, he tried flipping me over on my stomach, as if it were no big deal, just a normal part of the routine.

"In your dreams, buddy," I whispered. That tiny remark, casually tossed off as I clawed the sheets for dear life to protect my nether maidenhood and impede J from turning me over, launched us into an exploration of a world where reality and dreams blur--up to six times an hour if you've got the proper equipment.

The next day J came home with a sheaf of downloaded information about something called "lucid dreaming" and a catalog featuring equipment--goggles, beepers, recording devices--advertised to help precipitate lucid dreams, from a place called the Lucidity Institute. Loyal and true as they come, J would never stray. But, it seems, if I wasn't going to do what he wanted, he was going to dial up someone in his dreams who would.

Simply put, a lucid dream is one in which you're aware you're dreaming and are (you hope) able to shape the course and events of your dream. The Lucidity Institute, headed by Dr. Stephen LaBerge and situated in Palo Alto, California, is dedicated to teaching others to dream lucidly and to proving and promoting the phenomenon's many benefits. The curve varies widely, but learning how to dream lucidly can take from a few months to a few years. Once mastered, the institute asserts, lucid dreaming may be able to aid in everything from overcoming nightmares to problem solving to healing the body of disease to transcending "this mortal coil," as Hamlet referred to our physical beings (not its waste products). Here are a couple of accounts from Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, a book by Dr. LaBerge and Howard Rheingold.

"I realized I was dreaming. I raised my arms and began to rise. There are no words to describe the joy I felt. The euphoria lasted several days; the memory, forever."

"I am studying to become a professional musician (French horn). I focused on my desire to have a dream in which I was performing for a large audience by myself but was not nervous or suffering from any anxiety. On the third night of the experiment, I had a lucid dream in which I was performing a solo recital. When I woke up, I made a quick note of the dream and the piece I played. Two weeks later, I performed Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony with an orchestra. For the first time, nerves did not hamper my playing, and the performance went extremely well."

Lucid dreams also allow you to experience your fantasies. "You can kiss the person you love," the institute's literature sunnily exhorts. They had no idea of our dark intentions.

J and I decided to give this lucid dreaming thing a try, in the noble pursuit of engaging in lurid sex acts that we were unable (or unwilling) to perform in real life, and maybe also to dial ourselves up a couple of dream hotties. Maybe I could overcome my reluctance and distaste and learn to love J's peccadilloes by "rehearsing" them first in a dream. J was betting the farm on it.

Dreams don't come cheap. We considered several items in the Lucidity Institute catalog, all of which come with hefty price tags. At $275, the NovaDreamer is a mask you don upon going to bed. According to the catalog, "it detects when you're in REM sleep, then gives you a cue (flashing lights or sounds) to remind you to recognize you're dreaming." An intractable insomniac, I had my worries about being able to fall asleep at all with one of those gizmos.

The DreamSpeaker is a tape recorder of sorts that hooks up to the NovaDreamer, slips under your pillow and is also triggered to play back by rapid eye movement. Using the $150 speaker, you record a personal message to yourself, to help steer your dreams. I imagined what J would program. It might begin, "A nude and distraught Cameron Diaz approaches you. . . ."

Apparently, something called reality testing is a must for those in pursuit of lucidity. In the catalog, a device called the Programmable Electronic State Tester is advertised with this teaser: "Do you ever have difficulty remembering to do reality tests several times a day?"

Lord, don't we all? The PEST, it turns out, is really just an alarm device "disguised as a beeper," which flashes, beeps, or vibrates at random intervals, to remind you to think about lucid dreaming. It has a built-in state tester--basically, a button that flashes or beeps when you press it. If you see it flash and beep, you're awake! If you don't, they say, "You're probably asleep." Or the batteries ran out. It also boasts "a variety of features to suit your individual need for nagging." Clearly, the frequency with which I call my mother shows my need to be through-the-roof. So, at only $175, how could I not purchase the PEST? Included in the package is A Course in Lucid Dreaming ($50), a step-by-step workbook with exercises to help you, employing a variety of techniques. We planned to follow it to the letter, or at least give it a cursory glance.

I called the Lucidity Institute and placed my $600 order. The phone representative seemed shocked and grateful that someone was actually buying the stuff, and thanked me for "my contribution to the institute." I idly wondered what the money would be used for. If it could provide just one needy student with a NovaDreamer or a PEST, I'd be happy. Or maybe they'd use it to purchase curtains for the two-way mirror in the sleep lab, to give the place a more homey look. For once, I felt I was Part of the Solution. J and I eagerly waited for our dream booty to arrive in the mail.

In the meantime, I spoke with the highly respected sleep scientist, Dr. Mark Rosekind, president and chief scientist of Alertness Solutions, a scientific consulting firm. Dr. Rosekind said he respects LaBerge's breadth of knowledge on the science of sleep. Still, Rosekind noted, lucid dreaming is looked upon with a degree of skepticism by his fellow sleep scientists. "Its goal is valid enough--to access and utilize another piece of human potential, the two or so hours per night we usually spend dreaming. But the folks who believe in it are mostly doing the research on themselves. And though there are some phenomena there, their purported beneficial effects are hard to gauge in any scientific manner." Fair enough.

The Dream Gear Arrives

There they were, nestled in a plain brown box. The NovaDreamer, the DreamSpeaker, a plastic contraption that looks like a nurse's call button on a hospital bed, and a small black box with tiny knobs--the PEST. There were also a bunch of cables and a jack-like box. I stared at the gear dumbly, intimidated by the scientific appearance and the official-looking manuals that accompanied them. I'm a gal whose apartment is a collage of flashing lights from various appliances, each broadcasting a different hour. Rather than bother to learn how to program them, I prefer to simply adjust my schedule to the time displayed and proceed with my life accordingly. It's almost always 12:01 a.m. for me.

Then there was the textbook, A Course in Lucid Dreaming. I opened it and it looked like some kind of nightmarish ninth grade chem-lab course with quizzes at the end of each chapter. I shuddered and decided to focus on the less intimidating accompanying paperback, Exploring the World of Dreaming. It had a shiny cover with a cool picture of clouds, and it looked reassuringly anecdotal.

However, in the opening pages I was disquieted to read this finger-wagging note from the authors: "You are not likely to learn lucid dreaming by quickly skimming through this book." (How did they know?) They go on to lecture: "Anything worth learning requires effort. Motivation is essential; you have to really want to do it and make sufficient time to practice."

I flashed back to my childhood piano lessons. Sure, I wanted to be a concert pianist, but practicing cut into my after-school cartoon marathon. I had my priorities firmly in place--and today I have the pathetically labored chops to prove it. But this was different: the chance to tap my inner potential, make my husband happy and maybe get it on with a hunky movie star! No, damn it! This time I was going to apply myself. Titillated and brimming with resolve, I read on.

Some Cool Stuff You May Not Know About Sleep and Dreams

Well, I didn't, anyway. Rosekind and the book by LaBerge and Rheingold filled me in on the basics, and both were excellent sources. Like, did you know our sleep is characterized by two types of cycles lasting about 90 minutes combined--REM (characterized by rapid eye movement) and non-REM? And that we dream primarily during (continued on page 152) Dream On (continued from page 74) the REM part? We have several non-REM stages of sleep, during which everything in our body slows slows and we physically restore ourselves. We also go through several REM cycles a night, which gain in length and intensity, the last usually occurring before we awake for the final time to begin the day.

"In fact," Rosekind suggested, "one of the best ways to ensure having a dream and remembering it is just to set your alarm clock a little earlier than usual." (Well, that advice was a day late and $600 short.) During REM--"paradoxical sleep," as Rosekind terms it--our brains are as active as when we're awake, sending messages to our muscles to actually do what we're dreaming. As a self-protective measure, to keep ourselves from thrashing about, our bodies temporarily become paralyzed.

Another really cool fact: Dreams occur in real time. Though they may feel faster, any chore or activity you do in a dream occurs in the same amount of time it takes when awake: from climbing stairs to dialing a phone number to ... fucking. Wow. I was kind of hoping J's butt thing would be over lickety-split, so to speak.

LaBerge and Rheingold assert that "dreamed actions produce real effects on the body." In their book, they talk about experiments LaBerge and his fellow researchers have conducted in their sleep lab, referring to themselves as "oneironauts"--a dashing term not included in the dictionaries I checked, which means, as far as I can ascertain, "dream explorers."

Of particular interest to me was a study they did in the early Eighties on lucid dream sex, to try to determine how sex experienced during a lucid dream "would be reflected in physiological responses." They chose a woman subject, because, as the book breezily asserts, "women report more orgasms in dreams than men do." We do? When? Was I there? They continue, "We recorded many aspects of her physiology that would normally be affected by sexual arousal, including respiration, heart rate, vaginal muscle tone and vaginal pulse amplitude."

By all that's holy, how? I shuddered at the thought of that poor woman, flimsy paper hospital gown slipping, her buttocks touching the cold metal gurney, electrodes up the wazoo, her fellow oneironauts steaming up the two-way mirror as they feverishly took notes and fantasized about taking her.

Besides having the daunting task of trying to sleep through that, she was also supposed to produce a lucid sexy dream and signal to the lab, via an agreed-upon eye signal, at the following moments: "when she realized that she was dreaming, when she began sexual activity and when she experienced orgasm."

Incredibly, she performed all of the above feats, and the researchers found that almost everything increased during her dream "orgasm"--even her vaginal pulse amplitude. (What is that? An ability to pick up college radio stations in your twat?) But her heart rate remained the same. When they subsequently tested a couple of guys, their heart rates similarly remained unchanged. And no one ejaculated.

And the reason that most of us can't usually remember our dreams? Explains Rosekind: "When you go to sleep at night, the gate from short-term memory to long-term closes." Meaning, when you're awake, significant events, facts and numbers (like your zip code) that are in your short-term memory can get encoded and entered into your long-term memory. When you're asleep, they usually can't. Lucid dreaming, then, is also an attempt to get our dreams into our long-term memories.

It was time for me to try.

Keeping a Dream Journal

The book insists, before you even attempt to have a lucid dream, that you be able to remember at least one dream a night, for 12 nights in a row. It instructs you to keep a special dream journal by your bed and to jot down your dream as soon as you awaken from it, no matter what time. The book also counsels you to search for your "dream signs," out-of-the-ordinary objects and occurrences in your dreams, and to circle them in your journal, in order to acquaint yourself with the characteristics of your dreams. Then you know what to look for, to know you're in a dream.

I usually remember my dreams about four times a month. J says he never does. Here, then, was our first challenge.

I spent the first night, just before bed, rereading these opening chapters and preparing myself mentally, as the book instructs, to remember my dreams. J disinterestedly asked, "So, what's it say?" I filled him in briefly. He grunted and went back to Taxicab Confessions IV. The brute, I thought. How could he? We were attempting to conduct a real scientific experiment here. We were oneironautic pioneers preparing to traverse the dreamscape! I had my special dream notebook and a fountain pen, bought just for the purpose, at the ready by my bedside. J, I noticed with a competitive snort, just had a couple of pieces of scrap paper and an old Bic. Clearly, my dreams would be richer, and I'd be able to recall them in thrilling, vivid detail. I fell asleep to the strains of an inebriated couple straining to fuck each other in the backseat of a cab.

Night one and the morning after: an Oneironaut's journal

At first when I awoke, I remembered nothing. But then, lying still as the book recommends, a detail from my dream state flashed in my mind. I grabbed my sacred journal and scrawled down my epiphany:

"I'm Bea Arthur's character in the TV show The Golden Girls. Rue McClanahan and I want to go out for a night on the town. Betty White wants to tag along. Rue and I roll our eyes at each other."

That's it. J, on the other hand, excitedly tapped me on the shoulder as I was eking out my pitiful, elusive details, to recount a long, involved dream he'd had, made up of several episodes, full of symbols, Oedipal conflicts, fantastic occurrences and dream signs. It even had sex in it. Granted, it was a guy exposing his dick, which J promptly bit off. Rather disturbing.

There was no hint of a steamy tête-à-crotch with Ms. Diaz. Still, he'd filled up both sides of his scrap paper. I was a dream failure. A dream moron. I had, it seems, no unconscious.

Night Two

"I'm in a shoe store in my old college town. J is waiting outside in the car. I can't find the shoes I want but feel compelled to buy something. While in line, I hastily grab a shoe box, open it and see a pair of brown leather sandals. Not what I was looking for, but they'll do. The actor Kevin Kline walks in. I say hello and inquire after his family. He tells me he's blown his knees running and is looking for alternative exercise. I excitedly tell him about the great pool in the campus' new sports center. He indulges me with an 'uh-huh,' but I can tell he's not interested."

Not exactly the stuff of Carlos Castaneda, but still I excitedly jotted it down and circled my dream signs. "Shoe store." "Strappy sandals." "Kevin Kline." "Sports center." "I feel I'm onto something here," I noted.

Night Three

Four a.m. I sat bolt upright from a dream and recorded this nugget: "J and I are with a bunch of people in an upstairs room of a country restaurant. We go downstairs to leave. I try to pass through another room to get to the exit, but there is a waitress asleep on a chair blocking my path. I notice with admiration her patent leather platform shoes as I struggle to move her and her chair out of the way. I mutter indignantly, "They really shouldn't allow their waitresses to sleep in the middle of the room like this.'"

Again, I dutifully circled my dream signs. They mostly seem to involve designer footwear. I wondered: Does this make me a shallow person?

Night Four

Ignoring the authors' 12-night dictum, I considered myself proficient in dream recall and decided to try for the big kahuna: an actual lucid dream. The book lists several exercises designed to help induce lucid dreams. The early hours of the morning are most conducive to quickly entering the REM state, so one exercise exhorts you to "make time" for your lucid dream by setting your alarm two hours earlier than normal. When it goes off, you're supposed to get up and go about "business as usual." (What the hell would that be at 5:30 a.m.?) After two hours, you're supposed to go back to sleep, after visualizing what you want to dream about.

I numbly arose the next morning with the alarm and J's scratching sounds as he penned his nightly opus and then sighed contentedly and went back to sleep. Show-off. I attempted business as usual in the bathroom, but my bowels were having none of it. In order to stay awake, I downed a couple of mugs of espresso and passed the time reading from my junk e-mail. At 7:30 a.m., exhausted, shaking and dizzy from the caffeine, I got back into bed, just as J was getting ready for work. Over the blare of Howard Stern on the radio, I silently repeated my lucid dream mantra: "I'm going to have a lucid dream where I get it up the ass from J." As instructed, I tried to visualize it occurring. I shuddered and fell back asleep whimpering softly, "I'm getting it up the butt...I'm getting it up the butt...up the butt."

I dreamed I was having a lucid dream. "I'm having a lucid dream," I exclaimed excitedly, just as they described in the book. J and my butt, however, were nowhere in sight. And I quickly convinced myself that I wasn't having a lucid dream at all but was really awake. Then I woke up.

Night Five

I turned to another exercise in the book, the "61-point relaxation." "Figure 2.1 illustrates 61 points on the body. To do this exercise, you need to memorize the sequence of those points. This is not difficult."

No, not difficult--impossible. Maybe LaBerge and his cohorts get off on memorizing a diagram of the human body that, for sheer complexity, resembles the inner workings of an iMac, but me, I've got better things to do. Like get some goddamn rest! I'm exhausted. I let the book slip from my fingers and sleep the sleep of angels with nary a dream in sight. Clearly, it is time to strap on the dream gear.

Day Six: Getting in touch with my inner pest

The Programmable Electronic State Tester is designed to go off at random intervals throughout the day, to remind you to do a reality check and ascertain whether or not you're dreaming. The logic behind the contraption is that if you train yourself to do so while awake, you'll do the same when asleep--that is, you'll look for, and be able to recognize, signs that you just may be dreaming. One of the most conclusive among the many signs, say the oneironauts, is having the numbers on a digital clock or words on a page radically change when you glance away and then glance back. Finding yourself flying around the Acropolis in your underwear with your dead aunt is another tip-off, say I. The instruction manual is full of playful bon mots ("The PEST is a member of Class Electronica, Order Processoria, Family Smaller-Than-a-Breadboxia"), probably to get your mind off the fact that you just plunked down 175 bucks for a plastic beeper designed to annoy the crap out of you.

I set the buttons to the highest level of perturbance, simultaneous beeping, buzzing and flashing, and clipped the PEST to the inside of my short shorts. It made my ass look huge. What price lucidity?

When the contraption first went off J, alarmed, shouted, "What the hell was that?" But henceforth, he brightened each "reality test" by performing a series of stunts commonly used to freak out fellow stoned teenage friends. Like, standing on a chair just behind an entryway so that I couldn't see him, then sticking his face and arms out, Superman-style, so that it looked like he was flying. When we went out in public, I changed the alarm to the more discreet vibration. Each time it went off I giggled and got a pleasant sensation. Hmm. Maybe I'd clipped the PEST to the wrong place.

That night I slept with the PEST under my pillow and did my mental lucid dream work. The PEST was supposed to buzz periodically and nudge me along to remember to become lucid in my dream, and explore uncharted sexual territory. Well, I did explore new terrain in my dream, but it wasn't exactly what I had in mind.

"As research for this article, I am compelled to have sex with an older friend of J's--old-enough-to-be-my-grandfather old. He is disquietingly limber, in fact does a full center split and is quite proud of himself as he executes several other deliberate tantric sex moves. 'Wait a minute!' I shout. 'I'm in the wrong article!' But his sensual technique is fatally flawed--his lingam is soft as a sponge, so that, though he moves like a swami, it's no salami. J is watching the whole thing from the sidelines. He is not upset. Why should he be? I'm the one who has to have near-sex with the Jewish Gandhi over here! Where the hell is Brad Pitt?"

No lucidity. No sex. I'm tired of fucking around here. In fact, I'm just plain tired.

Night Seven: I bring out the big guns

The NovaDreamer slips over your face like a sleep mask, but there the similarity ends. It is designed to flash lights in your eyes and emit a series of beeps while you dream. The lights can become incorporated into your dream as, say, lights from a flashing fire engine, and you are supposed to train yourself to recognize them in their many guises. When you do, you will recognize that you are dreaming. Or something like that. The mechanism is triggered by rapid eye movement. The book reports that some who've used the mask found that the lights translated in their dreams as "the light of a thousand suns--a nuclear explosion." "This," they assure their readers, "is not bad." The hell it isn't! I set it to its lowest setting.

Then I whipped out the $150 DreamSpeaker. (J found virtually the same contraption at Radio Shack for 10 bucks.) Suddenly embarrassed, I took it to the bathroom to record my "dream message." The 15-second limit curtailed my elaborate dream intentions, so I limited my recorded message to a whispered, "I'm getting it up the ass! And I'm dreaming! I'm getting it up the butt! And I'm dreaming!" The quality of the playback was reminiscent of Thomas Edison's first recorded sound, "Mary had a little lamb. . . ." I brought the DreamSpeaker back to bed and, using the cables provided, hooked that, as well as the PEST, to the NovaDreamer mask. They were now all supposedly set to go off when I was in REM sleep. But before I slept, I did another exercise in the book designed to induce my lucid dream. As instructed, I wrote down what I wanted to have happen in my dream, and even drew a picture [see Figure 1]. Then as I fell asleep I concentrated on my intentions: Remember to remember your dream, remember to remember you're dreaming, remember to remember your dream intentions, remember when you wake up to remember to . . . I forget. It's so damn complicated. Finally, I plugged in, strapped on and turned up the juice. "I am beeping, buzzing and flashing. I am my own little intensive care unit," I noted. Somehow I fell asleep and. . . .

Flat line. No flashing lights. No lucid dream. No dream, period. On the other hand, I thought, maybe I had dreamed I had anal sex with J and my psyche just broke down, and this was some form of mercy amnesia. True, I awoke in the morning to find I had ripped the mask off my face sometime in the night.

Night Eight: the strain is beginning to show

Well, it was bound to happen. Fueled by lack of time and results and overwhelming apathy, J has given up his involvement in the Lucidity Project and has placed the burden of fulfilling his fantasies squarely on my dream shoulders. I've become so preoccupied with trying to spice up my dreams, J and I no longer have a waking sex life, nor a dream one that I can recall. Besides, J can't get near me through all those wires. He is not amused. I, however, remain determined. Relaxed, pleasantly drowsy and, once again, loaded for bear with dream gear, I have changed my DreamSpeaker message to the more peppy and upbeat. "I'm having anal sex with J. And I love it!" I cheer myself on with the affirmation "I shall fall asleep immediately and remember to be lucid. This stuff really works!" I kick up the SuperNovaDreamer a couple of notches to make sure I notice it this time, strap it on and blissfully prepare to sink into the arms of Morpheus.

I am interrupted by a series of glaring white flashes, burning my eye sockets. I gamely try to remain drowsy through them--I stop counting the number of flashes at 10. I'm blinded. Then what sounds like a siren goes off, followed by a head-shaking vibration and more aggressive light-flashing. What the hell piece of equipment is making that caralarm sound? J and I bolt upright in bed. I'm ripping gizmos off my eyes and trying to untangle myself from cables and wires. Finally, I find the button to shut the damn thing off. I fall back asleep amid a tangled nest of dream detritus.

I am jolted awake by J's cold feet. He's jammed against me, forcing me to the bed's edge. Why's he all the way over here when we have a king-size? I look over to see his five-year-old daughter sleeping sweetly, sprawled across half the bed. That explains it. I try to concentrate on my mantra and go back to sleep, but somehow, with her there, I can't drum up a passion for having anal sex with her daddy. It's just. So. Wrong. I give up and go to the living room, taking the PEST with me to continue my endeavors. I place it hopefully under the couch pillow and close my eyes. Seconds later, the PEST is buzzing and whining forlornly like a man who hasn't gotten laid in over a week. I reach under the pillow to turn it off, but it's gotten caught in the lining of the pillow. I hurl pillow and PEST against the wall. It lets out one more surprised and hostile screech and finally falls silent. Four short hours and one spy novel later, I am finally asleep and dreaming.

An old family friend is showing me his diseased penis. It is grotesquely engorged, swollen to resemble a five-pound water balloon. I am, unfortunately, not lucid and therefore not aware that this horrifying display is only a dream. How the hell does he fit that thing in his pants? I wonder.

Night Nine: Flying Solo

I decided to try having a lucid dream sans equipment. Actually, J decided this for me, having banned all gear from the bedroom, and I am intensely grateful to him.

I recalled this cool exercise in the book that involves "spinning" in your dreams. Whenever you feel yourself about to wake up from a dream, LaBerge and Rheingold assert, spin around in your dream, and this will spin you back into your dream, or into another.

I tried it, and it worked! I was drowsy, just falling asleep, and those weird dream images started entering my head. You know, the way that they'll drop in on you when you're half-asleep, half-awake, and start infiltrating your rational, daytime consciousness? Well, I was aware of them, and I wanted them to continue and take me into a dream, so I "spun" in my mind, and--voila!--there I was in a full-fledged dream!

Night 10: Full-Frontal Lucidity

I decided to be equipment-free and exercise-free, except for concentrating once more on my desire to have a lucid dream. Very soon, I was in a dream with a familiar scenario. In the dream, I'm onstage, wearing only a T-shirt that's a little too short to cover my unmentionables. I'm in front of a restless audience in my old high school auditorium; there are few well-wishers. The crowd is largely composed of taunting former classmates, teachers, boyfriends and bosses; all are just waiting for me to mess up. I'm in a Chekhov play, but I don't know which one and I can't remember my lines. My peers are playing their parts perfectly and hissing angry asides at me every time I miss a cue. To compensate, I start to improvise and overact terribly, screeching, "To Moscow! To Moscow!"

Every time I make a gesture, I inadvertently flash my pussy. Little kids are fainting in horror, my mother is tsk-tsking me and shaking her head in shame. J is up front and clapping, cheering me on, but it's no good. I haven't done this scene since high school. I try in vain to recall the lines. I can see the text, but I can't make it out. Then, all of a sudden, it hits me! Words aren't usually blurry on the page! And what would I be doing back in my high school auditorium, wearing just a T-shirt? I must be dreaming!

I'm elated! I go backstage and put on a pair of sweatpants and feel much better. I then step forward into the spotlight and explain to the audience that I'm dreaming, which is why I can't remember the text, and that usually I'm very well prepared. They understand and beam back at me. Except for J. He rushes the stage and starts trying to pull my sweatpants down. I struggle against him.

"You are dreaming! You are dreaming! This is just a dream!" he shouts. J's shouting roused me from my dream, and I awoke to find him indeed trying to pull the sheets down from me and climb on my back, making a pathetic attempt to convince me I was dreaming by trying to impersonate the DreamSpeaker. "You are dream------"

"Quit it!" I interrupted. "I was in the middle of a lucid dream, goddamn it!"

Dreamwise, it seems, we had come full circle and ended up just where we began, dancing the same pas de derriere and no closer to achieving our goals.

But just as I was about to knee him in the balls, I thought of his long-unsatisfied desires and recalled his patience over the past couple of weeks. What the hell, I thought. Everybody's gotta go sometime. And I let my J have his way. Yeah, right.

Lessons from an Amateur Oneironaut

All right, so I exaggerated some things here. I'm not sure I ever actually had a lucid dream. Maybe, as LaBerge and Rheingold warn, I was trying too hard. More likely, as they also warn, I wasn't trying hard enough. But in the world of dream exploration, are there really any winners or losers? Well, yes, actually.

Freud and Jung and their disciples might think so. They believed that dreams are reflections of internal dialogues, symbols and conflicts, and that if you manipulate your dreams, you're actually masking conflicts occurring in your subconscious, which may be harmful. The authors of Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming address this directly, asserting that, far from masking conflicts, lucid dreams can help us not only address but overcome them. I kind of buy that. And, flagrant failure aside, I found some stuff about this dream-studying to be cool. Let's face it, dreams are cool. Learning about and becoming more aware of them is cool. I found it valuable, learning to listen to and recognize my dreams. And that "spinning" back into a dream thing really works. Try it!

LaBerge and others at the Lucidity Institute are not bogus. They're genuinely excited by what they are doing, and I'm reasonably sure, in more diligent hands, their exercises might even work. That equipment, however, is ludicrous.

My biggest gripe about the whole lucid dreaming thing? It takes too much goddamn time! They advocate "utilizing the REM time that otherwise just goes to waste to squeeze another two hours of productivity out of your day." I don't want to! It's chore enough being productive when I'm awake! Give me blessed slumber! Deep and unconscious! Knock me out! For lucidity's sake, can't a gal even fuck off in her sleep anymore?

One dividend from this misbegotten enterprise: I am now remembering at least one, sometimes two or three dreams every night! "Hip hip hooray," a dispirited J chants listlessly.

But, ever the cockeyed optimist, he's sure that, in time, I'll learn to overcome my priggish objections and yield up my ass to the powers that be, if only to make him happy. And I'm equally sure that, in time, J will learn to let go of his unnatural obsession to take me from fore and aft, and just relish the good love and emotional and spiritual riches we share.

Oh well, everybody has to have a dream.

Flimsy paper gown slipping, her buttocks touching the cold metal gurney, electrodes up the wazoo.

I limited my recorded message to a whispered, "I'm getting it up the ass! and I'm dreaming! I'm getting it up the butt! and I'm dreaming!"