It began years ago as a fascination after waking up from a terrible dream with a weakened left side-- I had a stroke! Minutes before, I was sprinting away from a couple of cops chasing me for snatching somebody's bag. Then after zigzagging through rows of parked cars I darted across a busy major street to the middle island, the cops a-chasing, when a gunfire rang and I was hit on the right side of my neck. That is when I woke up writhing in pain, exactly where I was "hit" by the bullet. That stroke left me limping for sometime. At 22 I was treated for a disease supposed to afflict older people.
That was many years ago now but the dream was much too real to forget, I still could vividly remember many of the details, like it really happened. Many a dream later, I have learned to explore them. Some of the most vivid being my flying forays. I distinctly recall that part on one where as I was diving from above, it occured to me that I was just dreaming. Strangely, I hanged on, and as I passed by a huge tree near ground, I plucked one single leaf wishing to examine it. I remember vividly as I slowed down to land scrutinizing the leaf for its realness and materiality. Curiously, the texture, color, edges, veins, crispness... its every detailed part do not for a moment, at least in that dream, depart from my acquiantance with leaves in my waking state.
I dreamed of my mother months after she died. She was supposed to have summoned me to see her; how I got there, I do not know. But she was there along the rolling slopes of a grassy hill overlooking a sparse valley where a huge building was being constructed. She said, " I want you to see where I am now so you don't have to worry about me. It looks so much like before, except that here you could fly."
She looked much younger than when she died, maybe her appearance when she was 40 or 50. I roamed around to inspect the place. I got to an airfield near the hilltop where a decrepit plane was parked. Like a small kid I cavorted around the plane jumping and hanging on the plane's body. I remeber closely examining the metal body with much curiosity. Moments later my mother called for me. "It's time to go," she declared. She led me to where I could board an elevator going down. The elevator did not look too wide but was enough for some four or three passengers that included me. As we were going down, it dawned onto me that I was dreaming. I just surmised that I would wake up as soon as I walk out of the elevator, which I did, except that the thing "spewed" me out.
There are other stories but many escape me now. Only recently, I recall being on a twilight zone just before awakening in the morning. In the dream I was standing beside a fellow along with some others in a crowd, the story I can't figure out now. Anyway, I knew well enough I was dreaming and was about to wake up when I thought of hitting the man, curious at how it will turn out. He was able to hit me back before I was fully awake.
Some call it vivid dreaming but I could not fathom why such vividness or realism, detailedness or presence could exist in the state of sleep. Neurologists explain the mystery as the working of the brain's neurons; but how the firings of the neurons could create those interesting stories and magnificent landscapes, among other things, inside the dream dimension, is just mindboggling. In a dream you could sense an awareness that is as real as one in your waking state; and as I am doing this, I could recall of a like sense of wakefulness as perceptible as when I was in my dreams.
Consider then: if something could be as real as it is when you are awake though you are deep in slumber, then how real could be the things around us in our waking state? Could it be that our waking state is parallel to what we consider a dream, and elsewhere in another dimension we are in reality asleep?
