This post is going to be more about the psychology behind this rather than just a silly anecdote.
I've noticed in dreams that my subconscious and conscious get very "comfy" when alarming or surreal things happen. Of course, surreal things are constantly happening, but as I become more aware my subconscious actually moves to alter the course of the dream in order to keep me non-lucid. I get the beginning thoughts of, "this isn't real," those wtf moments that should make me lucid, but then the dream and my imagination seem to work in tandem to create a more plausible scenario.
I wonder if this is an emotional thing. It is when I am immersed emotionally in the dream world that I am not thinking lucidly and am just the typical DS; it is the moments where I am shaken from that immersion that lucidity comes to the fore. It makes sense: in any given mindset it is emotional immersion that prevents an aware and detached perspective. Emotion is that which clouds the mind, bends the consciousness into the odd shapes of one or another system of thought. I then wonder what emotions hold me in the regular dream, what emotions hold me in regular waking life. Nothing intense, but nothing more than a background feeling, yet one so fundamental to my existence that it permeates everything and is still unknown to me for the most part. That essence of being both in a moment yet in no moment, lost between the moments.
In the dream I was in some sort of game and then went into a car. I was driving/being driven around a large, futuristic city. Everything was fairly flat, yet with subtle layering, the buildings being a cross between apartments and industrial zones, everything in white concrete. We drove down an 8-lane highway, and I stopped paying attention to where we were going, perhaps lost on the scenery. I look ahead of us, and as I do I notice a cliff. I was mildly aware of it before, but had seen a bridge and assumed we would drive on fine. It was a very modern city in good shape, I has assumed the roads would not simply have us drive off a cliff. Yet there is a cliff with no road, and there are no warning signs or barricades.
Within a second the car has driven off the cliff and I see below and beyond a vast, vast complex of buildings and factories, stretching into the horizon. The cliff itself is almost perfectly perpendicular to the ground, and thousands of feet high (quite unrealistically, it must have been a mile or two at least). My vision at this point is fairly vivid, and as the car passes over the threshold and I notice the road give way to thin air beneath us, I am somewhat snapped out of my dreaming stupor. In the back of my mind somewhere, before the shock can set in, I remind myself it is only a dream, but this is a subtle thought, like a light breeze. At the same time I think of the absurdity, and immediately consider that it is the future and it may be on purpose. Like a faithful servant, my dream and subconscious stop the car from falling.
What little downward motion had been created at that point was held, but not accelerated. The momentum of my thoughts had led towards doom, yet in my moment of hesitation and doubt, I had stopped that doom short. The car gracefully followed an invisible track towards the other half of the highway, landing nicely on the downward slope of it. In fact it sloped less than the car at that point, and the moment of near-lucidity passed, and the previous moment's momentum resumed. The road became a water slide, and my car never quite landed right. It began accelerating again, skipping off the road, again unaware and out of control, and the road beneath became ever more steep until it plunged almost straight down. The car could not keep up and flew off the track, face down I could feel the rush of the drop. I could feel my face pushing heavily back into my skull, my body being sucked down, I could hear the wind around the car breaking into a loud scream, the speed increasing to hundreds of miles an hour, the world around me a dizzying swirl of a far off dark surface, a massive dark pool, accelerating towards me. The realism was uncanny for someone that had never experienced this (obviously). That surface, the ground (but such definitions don't matter - it is only the inevitability of the hard crash that does) was still some ways off, due to the height, but I knew it was only a matter of seconds, a minute or so tops. I began to think how the world had lost so much of its substance, and at the same time the fear kicked me out, into my bed.
In this dream I moved between vivid and immersing reality and near-lucid awareness and reflexivity. Whatever started the lucidity was quickly outweighed by the desires of the dream, the desires to dream, only overcome by the awareness of the breakdown of the plot, the inevitability of its demise, my demise, and the desire to not be hurt within that dream desire. The dream lost its reality both because I saw no further purpose in its reality and because I did not want its reality.
If I become aware of the reasons for my becoming aware, I should become aware in ways I hadn't previously. If it's done enough, it should become a tendency, an alteration of the natural balance of my desires and emotional constructs.
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