Every now and then I have something that I’ve decided to call a “vertical dream.” What this is is* a dream where things in one level seem to have implications for things in other levels. Okay, every now and then is too much; I’ve had two of these and the second one was last night. I guess these days they can probably be called Inception-style dreams; I’m sure Inception was inspired by a vertical dream its creator had.
* – This one is for you, LWS
The first one, a few years ago. I was dreaming and something really awful (my mom dying) was happening in the dream, and I just felt awful — and furthermore, I knew I was dreaming, and in the dream my heart was racing and I knew that I had to wake up — I felt like if I didn’t wake up, I would die. And I tried to wake up and it wasn’t working, really wasn’t working, and I was running out of time. Eventually I did manage to wake up and — I am not kidding about this — my heart was on fire, mile a minute, and I felt like I really had been about to die if I hadn’t woken up. I don’t know which way it went — if the dream caused the heart acceleration or if the heart acceleration caused the dream — but everything was very vertically integrated.
Which brings us to last night’s. Last night’s was very odd. Usually when you have nested dreams (not an infrequent occurrence to me) the levels are clearly defined. You go down to level 2, level 3, back to level 2, back to level 1, awake, or whatever. Last night’s dream was much blurrier. I was in level 1, and level 1 included a way to slip into a dreamlike state, with it being very explicit in level 1 that the dreamlike state interacted with real life (at the risk of sounding hackneyed, “if you die in the game you die for real”.) I spent a lot of time vacillating on whether or not to try it in level 1 before trying it. So now I’m in level 2 and essentially running around the city of New York (also level 1′s setting), panicking a little about whether I’m killing myself in level 1, when all of a sudden I wake up. When I wake up, I’m on a pier with a character from level 2 and I’m confused because I’m supposed to be on level 1 here, so I yell at him, “which level am I on?” and he doesn’t answer and I have no idea what’s going on and I’m panicking. He holds out a stick to me with a single branch point and both branches are wrapped in cellophane — in the dream, they are going to lead to different levels. I look at this and ask him and finally he tells me which one is which. I think about this for a little while and take the one that leads up, and I wake up for real. It was a very hard wake-up, one that is typically not a 1-level wakeup.
I still don’t understand, honestly, what happened here. I “must” have been on level 1 because I woke up from level 2, but the character and the setting were both from level 2 — I didn’t wake up to where I was in level 1 when I “went to sleep” (in scare quotes because I’m omitting some plot devices), but rather to roughly the same place I was at the start of level 2 (which is not where I woke up from; I’d been navigating level 2 for a while). And the whole thing was very vertically integrated right down to choosing the option to wake up. I don’t know what would have happened had I chosen the “go down” option — certainly I thought level 1 was “real” that time, and wasn’t aware that it wasn’t the top level (so in some sense I was very confused to wake up to level 0).
I guess I was on some sort of mezzanine level 1.5 at that point, but I think this is the first time I’ve ever had a dream which was not obviously just integer levels, +1 on the way down, and -1 on the way up barring something like an alarm clock going off.
