Thread: Lucid Deja Vu

Ok, I'll try to break this down the best I can, but parts are too fuzzy and too strange to remember or describe. Yesterday I visited my grandfather in the hospital, and the conversation of dreaming came up when he mentioned to the nurse that his blood pressure medication had a side effect of strange dreams. We started trading stories of dreams past, and soon his room mate on the other side of the curtain partition joined in. The man explained that he has never remembered dreaming, and as a child he was confused hearing people talk about them, because for him he simply slept until he woke, and he could recall nothing in this break in awareness. We started discussing some of the stranger aspects of dreaming, lucidity, third person perspectives, black and white coloration, delayed recall, ect... and we spoke for several minutes. I went home and was awake until 5 am, and being exhausted at such an hour I fell asleep almost immediately.

At this point I should mention that I think a lot about philosophical questions of reality vs. unreality, and the role of dreaming and other altered state of consciousness. This preoccupation stems from some experiences I have had which cannot really be explained with a rational mindset, and so my general view of reality has changed significantly to accommodate some level of may be objectively termed sanity.

Anyhow, I fall asleep shortly after 5 am, and my memory of this initial stage of the dreamworld is not very remarkable. At this point I am oblivious of the dream, and seem quite sure that the procession of scenes and people are utterly normal. The dream task at hand involves a curiously colored large mushroom that has somehow come to my acquisition. Knowing the potential of this object, I move through the dream scape looking for a properly peaceful setting to ingest it and wait for it to take hold.

I come upon an old town with rolling hills and green pastures, I decide this seems quaint enough. Wondering through the streets, I notice a large cemetery that gives way to a fantastic view of the landscape. The clouds and blue skies contrast beautifully with the foliage and pleasant topography, but the cemetery is obviously not the place to consume my shroom just yet, so I wonder further. Still in the town, I pass through the rickety wooden architecture looking for what I don't know, but I didn't need a destination. I eventually entered a shack in this welsh fantasy ghost town and saw that my grandparents were inside. My grandfather still lying in the hospital bed, he told me something I can't now remember, and with that I told them both I loved them and carried on my way.

The next room I found myself in was the first true indication that this would be one of my strangest dreams. The walls were covered in mirrors, and at the center were several merry-go-round figures, with a chrome pole running from the floor through the center to the ceiling. The animal figures were quite menacing and incomprehensible, staring at me with mouths agape, with jaw and lip structures in the shapes of various geometric shapes. The rabbit had a mouth with six points at right angles, in the center not a throat but a mirrored surface within another, seemingly onto infinite. Another had a triangle for a mouth, and there were perhaps five of the creatures mounted on their respective poles facing me.

Passing by them and exploring this room, I began to feel uneasy in their presence and remarked that I may need something to take if my trip should turn sour. I found to my surprise that my call was answered, and that this was someones work space. The man I had the conversation with in my grandfathers hospital room, the one who never drempt, emerged and offered me a tablet of some unknown substance to take if I should need to. I thanked him and asked about the odd animal figures. He explained that he was running "extra-dimensional experiments" and they were involved in this vague process. I remembered that I was still searching for a place to sit and eat my sacrament, so I was off to better things.

Beyond the town I found a fantastic section of deep sloping valleys with cresting ridges where it seemed perfect. I perched myself upon a flat spot, and looked down at what appeared to be endlessly dangerous drop offs into the crevasse below. I summoned a music playing device (possibly my phone), put on some tunes, and began to eat the mushroom in this sublime place not unlike something from 'the shire' vibrating with light and hidden magic.

Back in the real world, it is 8 am and the sun has crept through the blinds to briefly disturb my slumber. I half awake and reach into my bedside table for my eyeshades, and roll back into the warmth of my comforter. Now things get interesting. As I re-enter the dream, I never lose memory of the previous events previously described, and am fully expecting the mushroom to start taking effect. In flash I suddenly become aware, and find myself not in the dream I'd just been having, but one I'd had last week. Freestanding with all the same characters and settings, I'm now dreaming within a dream and have memory of both, in an incredibly peculiar feeling of lucid deja vu. It seems the effect of the dream shroom manifested itself as the "extra-dimensional experiment" the dreamless patient with the mirrored laboratory had just explained.

It felt as if I had appeared in a movie I had seen before, only within it I was free to manipulate events and control the inevitable reactions of the characters. I was simultaneously aware of these two distinct realities, only one was predetermined and the other was not. This realization was profoundly psychedelic in the sense of parallel dimensions experienced with salvia divinorum, psylocybin, or DMT, but it was all within my sleeping brain, and completely free of chemical interaction. The rule of this game seemed to be, that the environment and its interpreter were part of the same consciousness, and that I was not truly thinking my thoughts, but playing them out so to speak.

I should also say that last week I had dream that was quite nightmarish involving taking a psychedelic within the dream context, and the terror was so strong that I cannot remember what actually followed. I'm not sure if this memory was revealed in last nights dream and thus the experience of deja vu, but generally I have been having that feeling frequently in my dreams as of late, as well as more lucid realizations. I'm not sure what to make of it, but the implications of this are extremely interesting to me and the events of my wakeful life, which I tend to view as a sort of dream state within itself. Does anybody have a similar experience? Dosing with a psychedelic in a dream? Recurring dreams? Dreaming in a dream or transferring lucidity between them? If anyone took the time to read all of this thank you.