Blue_Opossum

Morning of December 1, 1990. Saturday.



In real life, I had been sleeping on the couch in the Loomis Street living room. My black vinyl-covered winter gloves with cloth cuffs were on the coffee table to my left. I was sleeping on my left side (facing north). The sun was already up and daylight was coming through the window on my right as well as the east window.

In my vivid dream, which came after I had been awake for a short time and fallen asleep again, I was watching a battle scene with army tanks and running soldiers. There is some sort of distortion where the battle scene seems to become miniaturized and occurring on the coffee table. I woke from this very clear dream imagery to be somewhat disoriented by still seeing the moving tank treads. There was a very light dizziness and an atypically sustained waking transition.

I had been gazing, open-eyed, before fully awake, at the open end of one of my winter gloves. The effect was a flawless transformation of what I had thought I was watching in my dream. The black cuff of my glove, the open cuff directly facing me, was still moving like a tank tread, and it took several seconds before the hypnopompic illusion faded.

I found this waking illusion fascinating. Apparently, my reticular activating system was slower than usual this time (and I was colder as well), as I do not usually have sustained hypnopompic hallucinations (which are always caused by incorrectly perceiving a feature in my environment with open eyes yet while still sleeping and dreaming). (When I have watched vivid hypnagogia for typically an hour or more during the first part of every sleeping period since early childhood, it is never integrated into any real aspect of my environment and I always know what it is, using it to deliberately “step into” a dream setting of my choice. The first hour of hypnagogia is usually fully lucid whereas hypnopompia is not and rarely lasts more than a few seconds, with only some exceptions, such as this one, in my lifetime.)

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