Question about a really tricky dream!-LONG READ, but please HELP!

**storykeeper** · 01-05-2014 08:36 PM

HEy folks

So, I´m new here, and I came to this place to specificaly ask for your opinion about a recent dream of mine that really has me thinking.

As background information, I moved out of my parents place 2 years ago, because we weren´t getting along and it would have gone real bad if we didn´t get some space. Anyways, I now live in my own flat and it´s been a liberation ever since. I always felt my parents were oppressing and that I couldn´t breathe properly in their house. But I do have reoccurring dreams where I wake up at my old room again, and I find out that for some reason I have gone back to my old place after work instead of going to my flat. Or I would have gone back because I wanted to get the rest of my stuff (i left quit a lot behind). So here I´m wondering what the hell I´m doing there and how to get back and I´m saying to myself to not get back to my parents place next time and stuff.

The thing is, I taught myself to know that I´m dreaming as soon as i´m with my parents again, and it has been working quite well. Only yesterday, this happened on one of those dreams:

It was as if I had two shows running at the same time: part of me was in the dream in my parents house, the other part was in my appartment (the real world so to say). Now, whereas I know the parents part was unreal, the real-thing bit also felt unreal. I kept remembering stuff that never happened, so I knew i was dreaming here to, but I wasn´t entirely sure, because compared to the parents bit, this HAD to be real, so I taught myself.

Being a diligent LDstudent, I was now searching for a sign to confirm I was dreaming. I immediately thought of the lightswitch, and said: i cant turn the lights on, it wont work, cos i know i´m dreaming. BUT, i flipped the switch and the light turned on. no delay,no flicker, nothing. I was baffled. Then I thought of finding something to read and grabbed a book....and i COULD READ! in my dream! it was a book about animals, hardcover, not very high, larger width, and thick with a hardcover, I flicked through it and saw pictures and text. I stopped on a page about snakes, read a passage, looked away and back...and read the exact same passage. The book stayed the same, had the same weight, the pictures on the page where the same, I was still in my room and read the exact same words I read before. I also clearly remember looking at my wristwatch, and it stayed about
3pm (analog watch). I soon afterwards woke up for real and couldn´t get this out of my head. NONE of the usual dream indicators worked. I chose 3 different methods, and none of them confirmed that i was dreaming.

So was some part of me trying to deceive me in such a cunning way that the dream was so well constructed that it could not be revealed as a dream? The parents-part of the dream never disappeared though, it was as if this part of the dream that I definitely knew to be a dream was continuing in the background.

If you stayed with me this far, I´d really love to read your views about this! thank you!

**Lucidpotential** · 01-05-2014 11:04 PM

Hi there!
I find it a drag when things don't work or are hard to read in a dream. I think you are lucky. The feeling of "Unreal" is a far better reality check and less frustrating.
Check out this thread by flowofmysoul. Maybe your dream was something like what he is talking about.

http://www.dreamviews.com/general-lu...i-layered.html

Originally Posted by flowofmysoul

Since long time I wanted to post this, but was doing more research to bring up more details.

I think that we never experience 1 dream at a time. When we dream we always have other dreams running in background. I counted that in average we experience at least 2-3 dreams at once. Meaning that in every dream or lucid dream there must be other dreams playing in background. All dreams are multi-layered.
I think that sometimes we experience up to 5 dreams, but I might be wrong with "5", because it is a complicated process to watch and it is pretty hard to interpret all of them at once, so I might be wrong with "5".

Attachment 6141
It looks and feels like layers, but they have no borders, full-screen layers. Instead of simply switching between them, they are getting transparent when you switch. For example if you are having LD on 1st layer and you want to move to another layer, your 1st layer LD will fade away and will get kind of transparent, at the same time, dream in the background will start moving on top, replacing the old 1st layer LD, getting less and less transparent, while old 1st layer LD will completely fade to background. You can do it slowly or you can do it fast, it is a very easy process once you learn how to control it. You can switch really fast between layers with no stress at all, it is a very simple process. For example if you are having 3 layers, you can switch between them around 5-10 times per second if you wish to, but that makes it hard to interpret and understand them all at once. Once I tried to observe them all at once and I ended up with a pretty mixed and not logical recall.

It might be different for everybody, depends on level of awareness and experience in Lucid Dreaming. Since all my dreams are lucid, It was a big mystery for me, how those dreams are playing on the background?
I was looking for those answers and this is what I found. For example I am having around 3 layers, I am having my main, 1st layer LD, I know that in background I have others playing. I slowly try to focus on other dreams that are somewhere at the back, my main LD fades away, my new dream is arising. I observed how my other dream, that was always there in the background, is having its own scenario, its own flow. I tried not to interrupt it, it was a completely different dream, I was not even thinking of what is going there, I did not order that kind of scenario. So that dream was going on Autopilot, however when I completely switched to it, it became lucid. Things stopped going by its own way and I noticed how things started to change in that dream when I took control of it.
So I can assume that whenever we are having a Lucid Dream we are also having a Non-Lucid dream somewhere in the background, you might not call it Non-Lucid, it is more like on Autopilot. It is going its own way, naturally. Well maybe controlled by our subconscious mind, meaning that our subconscious mind can multi-task easy? Or not, maybe our subconscious mind is getting confused when controlling all those layers, that is why it looks so weird for us. Imagine your self doing 3 tasks at once, at some point you might get confused and do/say something stupid.

That is not all, we always have our old memories playing in REM dream. We are having our main, 1st layer dream/lucid dream, at the same time we are experiencing another dream on the background and at the same time we experience our past memories, mostly memories that are important, those that happened during last waking day, mixed with old memories from past days, old important memories. This layer improves our important memories and makes it stronger. You can also switch to it, you can observe it or you can turn it into another Lucid Dream if you wish to. From here we get those LD's/Dreams that remind us of past memories. You might not recall it, but when you are experiencing Lucid Dream that looks like some situation from your waking life, you most probably switched to this layer and modified it as soon as it became lucid. Or you may simply observe it like any other layer if you can, for me it is hard to hold my self from taking control of it.

That's it for now.

**storykeeper** · 01-06-2014 07:43 PM

hey! thanx for the article, that's a really interesting read. i think it applies partly to my epxerience, one dream was lucid, and the other one was on autopilot in the background! but still, it's rather disconcerting when you somehow know you are dreaming, but can't find prove, and begin to wonder whether you're right at all...hmm