The work on the papers and other ideas had brought me near the end of my freshman year, and that was the time to plan next year’s classes and, ideally, to declare a major. Since I couldn’t progress on the goals within dreamwalks, I tried to figure out what classes would help me in other ways.
I wanted to learn computer science to better keep up with what the developers at my company were doing. I wanted to learn physics, to see if there was any way to explain what I was doing as a real-world phenomenon. I wanted to learn biology, or chemistry, or medicine, whatever would best help me to understand my brain. I wanted to learn psychology, which included the study of dreams. I wanted to study literature, so I could find more relevant stories to probe into, or to figure out how to write my own.
When I spilled all this out to my adviser, one of the few here who knew about my dreamwalking, he replied, “There’s no way you can fit all that into four years, even if you take summer classes.”
“I have no need to do it in four years. I have both the time and money to devote to this.”
With that, he set up a plan for me to do a physics and psychology double major with computer science and literature minors over six years. He figured I’d get enough chemistry from the requirements of the physics degree, and enough biology from the psych requirements, except he was going to have me take two upper-level biology classes about the brain that were normally only available to majors, but he felt sure he could get me an exemption to enroll in them when the time came. Biology, he pointed out, was a broad subject area and I only had a limited interest there. And he explained that a doctorate in medicine or psychology would probably be a way to learn about the brain in more depth, but I should do that after my bachelor’s degree.
Detailed scheduling would have to wait, but we worked out a loose plan for me to take the classes over 6 years. My summers would be important breaks from all the class pressure, except this first summer he had me enroll in an intensive Japanese class to learn the language properly and not just the assorted written vocabulary I’d learned from Google Translate.
When I told my parents my plan, they were surprised, but supportive. They already knew I wasn’t going to be normal, and they felt that devoting a portion of my inheritance to studying more subjects was a fine thing to do. A lot of parents would have worried, among other things how they were going to pay for it, but between the inheritance and the annual income that came from the company, I could afford it in a way few other college students could.
I dedicated myself to the classes during the long semesters after that, allowing myself to relax and actually have some sort of social life in the evenings and weekends, apart from occasional meetings with my lead developer. Overnight dreamwalks covered a variety of different areas. Keeping an eye on World of Dreams only needed short visits a couple times a week, so I devoted two full nights a week to exploring new games and worlds from fiction, and others revisiting interesting dreamwalk destinations I’d discovered, or do what I called “immersion” to help me learn Japanese more with those light dreamwalks that only observed people rather than controlling them, by just observing people in Japan doing ordinary things.
One of those interesting games provided me with a way to turn some overnight sessions into “study hall”. I was able to make copies of texts I brought in and leave the copies there, and either do extra study in my sleep to help with difficult concepts in class, or do independent extra study.
The summer after my sophomore year I started trying to put it all together. If I could actually explain dreamwalking, or even a part of it, I might be able to use that knowledge to... do what exactly? Something even more insanely powerful than I could already do, but dared not?
I realized that I hadn’t really thought through this. I wasn’t sure what my goal really was. Maybe that was part of what I had to figure out. But I started a list of ideas, however outlandish, and though I was tempted to cross out some of them as impossible, ultimately I decided that I should only cross out those that are too dangerous if they actually work. But what the list really came down to was exploring different avenues to find other people who could dreamwalk, even if they hadn’t done so already or didn’t realize they could.
An idea with lots of potential was a phenomenon called lucid dreaming. This was much studied and little understood within the realm of psychology. It wasn’t even fully agreed upon as to what it is, but it is some combination of being aware that you are dreaming and being able to control the dream. People could be trained to have lucid dreams, but not like I do; they only had lucid dreams some of the time, and it was considered a minor success for people who had never had a lucid dream before to be able to have just one lucid dream. Nevertheless, it was notable as being a real scientific concept I could relate to a part of my experience, but only a part of it. If I could establish a link between lucid dreaming and what I did, maybe I could promote something based on lucid dreaming that would bring me more potential dreamwalkers.
The idea of being able to choose what you dream about was not considered part of lucid dreaming, or even related to it. That was a completely different concept from being able to direct your actions within the dream, whatever it was about. And being able to put yourself into a dream state was yet another thing, but there were a lot of studies on it, showing that both meditation techniques and certain drugs could influence it. Hiroshi had taught me how to do this as a lesson in World of Dreams, and he was probably passing on something he’d learned himself from studies like this.
A lot of dream research focused on the idea of rapid eye movements or REM. Sleeping people alternated between periods of REM and periods without REM, and they could experience dreams in both, but they are different kinds of dreams, and REM dreams are more common. Interestingly, people normally only dream for about 5 to 20 minutes at a time, within one REM or non-REM cycle. This made me wonder what I did, whether my dreams were associated with REM or non-REM sleep, and what kind of a freak sleep researchers would consider me when they found I could dream for more than 6 hours at a time.
I did find and enroll in a sleep study, but before my sleep session I told the researchers that I didn’t have normal sleep and it was possible my data would be so much of an outlier it wasn’t useful for their study, but I still wanted to hear the results. And they said if I was so sure my data wasn’t going to be useful, they should not pay me for my participation, so we agreed I would sleep with their equipment on for one night, they would collect the data and share it with me, but I wouldn’t be paid for it nor would they ask me to pay them. The report I got back from the team confirmed I was as much an outlier as I thought.
“I’m sure somebody wants to study you, but you are definitely way outside the norms and we can’t possibly include your data in the study. You’re basically backward of how normal people sleep!”
They found that as soon as I got to sleep, I entered REM sleep, but only briefly, in two different modes which both seemed like some sort of dream but not a normal REM dream. The REM periods were interrupted by long spans of non-REM sleep which were each one long, deep dream interrupted only when I entered REM sleep again. What this meant in my terms was that the mode where I was selecting a destination was in REM sleep, with the times I used the menus and the times I searched for a destination purely in thought showing up as two different REM modes. The dreamwalks were detected as deep non-REM sleep. That I was lucid in the non-REM dreams was also unprecedented.
But this likewise told me I couldn’t use any of the conventional research on lucid dreaming to explain what I did, and I was unlikely to be able to teach lucid dreamers how to dreamwalk. I did have one idea, though. My REM sleep was still lucid, in that I both realized I was in a dream and could control what I did there. It was unlike lucid dreaming that within that lucid dream I could effectively choose what to dream about and then do so. Maybe that was what was needed: Get lucid dreamers, the kind who could choose their actions within the dream, to choose to dream a specific dream within the dream.
So that was one viable idea I got out of the entire field of lucid dreaming. I convinced one of my psych professors to organize such a study (in part by funding it), hiring people who’d already shown the ability to lucid-dream and asking them to dream about a specific subject within the lucid dream when they experienced one. And I was sitting there listening for any outsiders to dreamwalk in during the nights of the study. Our study yielded no positive results. But maybe a larger study was needed, or a different technique.
