Lucid dreaming is a strange phenomenon where the dreamer exists in a state between the conscious and unconscious plane. I have only had two or three of them in my life, but the other night I was fortunate enough to experience another. In the dream, my house had altered and was also a hotel for paying guests. There was a bar in the lobby, in which my friend Darren sat getting drunk. Upstairs in the master bedroom, there was another floor encircling the room, a library with rows of bookcases, ladders, and reading tables. The two Dali pictures that hang on the wall behind my bed, 'The Persistence of Memory' and 'Swans Reflecting Elephants' had fallen off onto the floor. The wallpaper had bubbled and peeled off, and rivulets of water streamed down the damaged wall onto the pillows.
Elsewhere in the room, water had eroded the masonry and soft chunks of plaster were dribbling off the walls. Cornices were crumbling. The room was a mess and in urgent need of repair. My wife pointed out that the water was coming from a skylight above our bed, up in the library area, that had been left open since we moved in four years ago. I had never even realised such a skylight existed. It was raining heavily outside. Using a metal extendable iron pole, I pulled the hook on the skylight and closed it. I phoned my plumber, Jack, who exists in real life, and explained the situation, begging him to come over to attend to the problem. Jack was less than enthusiastic about the job, and claimed that it was above his skill level.
It was at this point that I woke up, but also remained in the dream. With one leg in the dream world and the other in reality, I experienced the immense relief that my house wasn't falling to pieces, and yet I was still on the phone to Jack. I could see my wife lying in the bed next to me, and knew that it was time to get my daughter ready, yet this phone call needed to be wrapped up. I told Jack not to worry, that it was all merely a dream and my room was fine. He was understandably confused, and grew annoyed that I was wasting his time. I then explained to him that he wasn't real, but a figment of my imagination. The poor man experienced deep existential dread and began to have a meltdown after realising his entire existence was a sham.
This raised some interesting questions for me on the nature of reality, and on those liminal spaces between the different states of being. Jack is a real person, who I've hired numerous times, and yet in this instance, he was not real, although he still possessed a clear identity and sense of existence. After concluding the phone call, I then had a choice of whether to return fully to the dreamworld and continue the dream, or get out of bed and begin my day. I opted for the latter, but for a fleeting moment, I had full control over both halves of the brain.
