I think most people have experienced this from time to time: You have a dream that ends with some sort of loud noise which starts to sound more and more like your alarm clock, and then you wake up. The dreaming mind tries at first to incorporate the noise into the dream, but as the noise persists, this becomes harder and harder to do, until finally the spell is broken and you wake.
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Last night I slept very deeply and had two long, detailed dreams.
The first was a discourse on how the eyes of "halflings" (hobbits) differ from our own. They can perceive shortwave infrared and also, strangely, hear it. They perceive it with their eyes, not their ears, but by some quirk of their brain circuitry, the visual qualia are accompanied by a sort of shrill hissing sound, louder as the IR radiation is "brighter." I tried to imagine what this would be like, and how strange it would be for too much infrared to make it hard to hear other things.
The second dream was set in southern India, perhaps somewhere in Goa or thereabouts, where I discovered that an Indian man had surreptitiously "borrowed" my motorcycle ignition key and made a copy of it. At first I assumed that this was so that he could later use the bike without my knowledge or consent, but later I encountered him trying to sell someone a car, and the key for this car was the copy he had made of my own key. So instead of stealing my motorcycle, he had apparently made a car so that it would be easy for me to steal. The motive behind this was opaque.
I was traveling with an Indian woman, and I began to suspect that she was this man's accomplice and had facilitated the theft of the key. Later, this woman asked me, "What do you think of Hagar?" After thinking first of Abraham's concubine and then of the comic-strip Viking, I said, "Sammy Hagar? I don't know much about him. Why?" She said, "I'm sleeping with his stepson." I thought this was meant to impress me, and it reminded me of a waking-life incident when I was 17 and one of my professors kept trying to set me up with her daughter. For some reason, she thought I would be impressed to hear that her daughter had once dated Marilyn Manson, but I was so out of touch with popular culture that I assumed she was talking about some sort of lesbian liaison.
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I was then awoken in the early hours of the morning by my wife coming to bed. She had been unable to sleep, she said, and had sat up reading for a while.
We both lay down, and before I had fallen asleep again, my alarm rang. I remembered that, wanting to get some things done in the morning before work, I had set two alarms: my usual one and another an hour earlier. That way, if I was too tired to get up early, I could just go back to sleep until the second alarm.
I reached for my phone to turn off the alarm but found that I couldn't. I tried various things, and finally tried to power off the phone itself, but nothing worked. Then I realized that it wasn't my phone. "Sorry," I said to my wife. "I grabbed yours by mistake."
I found my own phone on the bed and again tried to turn off the alarm, but I soon discovered that this wasn't my phone either, but rather the old GPS device we used to use in the pre-smartphone days.
I found yet another phone on the bed and picked it up. Was the sound coming from this one? Was it vibrating? I couldn't really tell. Then I noticed it had a keypad and must be one of my wife's old phones.
This continued for what seemed like an impossibly long time. I wanted to ask my wife why she had kept so many of her old phones and put them all on the bed, but she had somehow fallen asleep, despite the continual racket of the alarm, and I didn't want to bother her. Having exhausted the bedroom, I ventured out into the study, the bathroom, the balcony, trying to find where I had put my phone. I never did find it. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the alarm stopped, and I went back to sleep.
After what felt like a very brief period of dreamless sleep, the alarm sounded again. I woke up, immediately found my phone on the nightstand, and turned off the alarm. My wife was not in the room. I remembered that she was sleeping in the guest room on another floor because I had been snoring. Th clock showed that this was my second alarm.
Apparently, the first alarm had sounded for the full 30 minutes it takes for it to shut itself off, but despite hearing it very clearly and recognizing it as my alarm, I had failed to wake up. Why? Because it fit too well into my dream, and the longer it continued, the better it fit into the dream's developing storyline. Thus it could not shock me into enlightenment. I could not recognize it as something coming from outside the dream world, calling me to wake up into a different world. I was in no such dream when the second alarm rang, and thus woke up effortlessly.
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Upon waking, for real, I immediately thought that this experience was meant to teach me something. It seems likely that some of us, before incarnating, will arrange for certain experiences to happen at some point in our mortal lives to wake us up, to help us remember who we are and what we're supposed to be doing. But if this wake-up call fits too neatly into our mortal life -- if we reach the point where impossible things become "normal" and are accepted as part of life -- it fails. I thought of a Russian rhyme I learned ages ago:
Я живу и не тужу,Потому что я жужжу!
Loosely translated:
I live my life, and nothing upsets me,Because I buzz.
If you're always buzzing, the buzz of the alarm is without effect.
I think this is one of the purposes of the current hiatus, during which syncs have slowed to a manageable trickle. This is going back to sleep after the first alarm has gone on and on and on, in the hope that the second will do the trick.
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Thinking about this on the road today, I thought that perhaps people whose "normal life" is very normal indeed might more readily awaken into another world -- and for some reason, as (rather dubious) examples of this, I thought of Ted Rice, whose story is told in Karla Turner's Masquerade of Angels, and of Karla Turner herself. Just then, a motorcyclist pulled in front of me with this on her backpack. At the next red light, I snapped a photo.
This is the black-and-white cover of my bootleg copy of Karla Turner's Into the Fringe:
I will have more to say about Dr. Turner at a later date, but now if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to sleep. My second alarm is set for January 17.
