Lucid Dream 3

Photo by nour elhakim on Unsplash

This is a piece in a growing series of mine about dreams and lucid dreaming. In these stories I give first person accountings of some of the dreams that I have each night. Identities and locations can shift around with little to no warning and the narratives don’t follow typical plot structures. For more of these stories, click here.

Here I am again. I’m at the beach. It feels like an odd combination of Hawaii, New Jersey, North Philadelphia, and Malibu. I’ve been here before. Not in real life — I come here in my dreams a lot, but I’m not sure why. There’s an odd consistency to the fictional places I visit in my dreams. It’s difficult to describe. Some of the places I visit are distinct from any place I’ve ever visited in my waking life.

And yet — within my dreams, there’s an unmistakable sameness each time I arrive. It’s a sameness that feels purposeful. If I haven’t been here before, why does my mind always assemble this strange town in this same way? I’ve heard it rumored that our sleeping minds can’t simply create entirely new faces and locations from scratch, but this is not my experience.

To my right, there’s a beach and to my left, houses. Behind the houses, vegetation lines each of the streets that meander their way toward a mysterious, distant marshland. Behind the marshland are sprawling mountains. It’s bizarre how little these details vary. Sometimes it…