I know why we forget our dreams

A while back I came across some online communities for lucid dreaming. For those who don’t know, lucid dreaming is the act of becoming self-aware in your dreams and even being able to manipulate them. You can go wherever you want to, summon whatever objects you like, interact with whomever you want, etc.

It took weeks of practice and dream journaling, but I still remember the first time I succeeded: I ended up flying around my home of downtown Salt Lake City, kissing an old girlfriend, and driving a Bugatti Veyron down the Autobohn. I didn’t lucid dream again until about a week later - that time I was more adventurous, meeting up with characters from my favorite Walter Moers books, rendevouzing with some female celebrities I won’t name (if it isn’t apparent, I’m pretty lonely) and then flying a bus into the sun because I wanted to see what would happen (the sun exploded.) As time went by, my lucid dreams became more frequent and I became almost perfectly capable of controlling them. Monster trucks, alien worlds, movie stars, famous characters - whatever I could imagine. Sounds awesome, right?

Well, after the fifth or sixth time, I made a disheartening discovery: lucid dreaming was becoming an empty experience. The novelty had worn off, only to reveal that the more I knew I was in a dream, the less fun everything became. I knew that whatever I did or saw wasn’t real, so any gravity or excitement I might have felt disappeared: the beautiful women were just shells without souls; the landscapes were like paintings that, while striking, were only shades of the things they represented. Lucid dreaming became like trying to take a bite out of Raspberry Sherbet, only to realize that you were eating unflavored cream: bland and unfulfilling.

Unsatisfied with lucid dreaming, I started to research everything about dreams from any source available: science, pseudoscience, paranormal theories, world religions, you name it. One evening, as I was reading something from Dr. Stephen LaBerge, I was struck by a thought - what if lucid dreaming wasn’t the limit to dreams? Maybe I could go deeper. To what, though? I could only guess; nobody online seemed to have any answers to that.

Since I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I started meditating every day. Ironically, my dreams became more uncontrollable: I retained my awareness, but I would will certain things to happen and they wouldn’t, or things and creatures I hadn’t thought of would appear, and when I tried to will them away, they didn’t leave. Still I kept going.

One night, as I dreamt of walking the crowded streets of Chicago, I had an idea - perhaps I could meditate in my dream? I’d only ever done it awake. So, I sat down on the sidewalk as crowds of people who didn’t exist passed around me. I closed my eyes, concentrated on my breathing, and tried emptying my thoughts. Suddenly, my body started to feel heavier and heavier: though I stayed the same size, I started to feel like I weighed twice as much, then four times, than eight - soon I felt as heavy as a truck. It became unbearable; I couldn’t move any of my frame under the weight, and I realized that I couldn’t breathe. I started to panic; I opened my eyes, gasped for air, and tried to move - and then I woke up.

Whatever that had been, it felt a hundred times more real than any lucid dream.

I decided to keep pushing. For months, whenever I would find myself in a lucid dream I would sit down and meditate - I could go longer and longer each time, my body feeling heavier and heavier, but it would eventually became so unbearable that I would wake up. Why did I feel heavier? What was I getting into? I could only guess, but I persisted.

Until last night.

I was dreaming about hiking the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico; like several times before, I sat and started meditating. My body became heavier - but I could take it. I became even heavier - I could take it still. Soon I weighed as much as truck; as a tractor; as a whale; as a skyscraper. I’d never gone this far. Suddenly I started to feel a pulling sensation - like my entire body was being tugged at from all different directions. This was new - my stomach sank as fear started to crawl through my chest. I almost wanted to move, to make it stop - but my arms weighed as much as cities. I couldn’t breathe anymore; the pulling started to tear me apart from the inside, I started to black out and ...

***

I was standing in a vast, gray field. The grass below my feet was dead - it crunched as I stepped around. Above me was an infinite black sky, swirling with wispy, blood red clouds; I could see shining galaxies and dimly twinkling stars. Whether it was night, or whether I stood in a plane that gazed directly into the cosmos, I couldn’t tell.

Suddenly, I heard a scream in the distance. I turned - and it took me a moment to register what I saw.

There were thousands of heads, stretching all the way to the horizon, all sticking out of the ground - and from the top of each head, a glowing, ethereal-looking thread sprouted and stretched upward. I craned my head up, and saw that the threads stretched all the way up into space until they disappeared from view. Every once in a while, a head screamed - and it made my blood run cold.

As I made my way to the heads, I saw that they were still connected to their respective owners: millions of people were buried up to their necks, their eyes closed and heads lolling in slumber. Some looked peaceful; most didn’t. As I watched them, I realized that I didn’t feel the same emptiness from them I felt from the shells of people I created in my dreams. There was a gravity to them.

My discovery was soon interrupted, however, by the sound of a grunt. I turned; about fifty feet out, there was a figure walking among the sleeping people. It was a man; as I got closer I saw he wore an old-fashioned suit, and he was holding a pair of giant scissors, like the kind used for cutting ribbons at store openings. He shuffled among the forest of heads, apparently considering each one carefully. For a horrible moment, I thought he was going to start cutting off heads - but I soon saw that he was actually inspecting the threads above them. I watched as he approached an older woman - her face was perturbed. The man reached out his scissors, and with a snip he severed the thread above her head. The severed thread faded away, and after a moment, the woman’s face relaxed. As I watched the thread slowly returned, though it seemed weaker - more faded - than before.

The man stood there for a moment, considering his work - and then he turned to look at me.

“You shouldn’t be here,” said the man.

I would describe what his face looked like - only, I can’t. The best I can say is this: it was like his face wouldn’t stop moving, shifting, changing. First he had two brown eyes, then he had four eyes that each looked like seashells; one moment his nose was large and in the center of his face, the next it was small and shifted to his lower right cheek and looked vaguely like a train. It was like watching a motion-blurred Picasso painting that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be.

“What’s the matter, boy, you a mute?” said the man gruffly. “Speak up.” He came closer; at first I thought he was going to try and shove me into the ground with the rest of the people, but he merely kept inspecting the sleepers. A few yards from us, an old man screamed.

“Why, uh --” I had to gather my thoughts, “uh, why does your face, uh -”

“My face is fine,” the man huffed. “Not my fault if your mind can’t make sense of it.”

I was a bit taken aback by the man’s rudeness, but I asked him his name.

“Morpheus, the Sand Man, the Dreamcatcher - you pick,” he shrugged.

“What - what are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m saving us all,” he replied.

“Saving us?”

“Yup.”

“Saving us from what?”

“Them,” he said, and pointed up into the dark sky. I gazed above me; all I saw were red clouds in front of the endless black abyss of space. The man continued his walk, checking out threads. Rather than being left behind in this alien place, I followed him. From somewhere in the distance came the scream of a woman.

“I don’t see anybody up there,” I said as I caught up.

“And they don’t see you,” he said. “Let’s keep it that way.”

“Really?” I asked. “Why?”

“I know a lot of people say ‘you don’t want to know,’” he said as he continued walking, “but believe me, you don’t want to know.”

“Humor me,” I insisted. He sighed.

“I’ll spare you the details - I’ve seen what they’ve done to other lifeforms, and it’s not pretty. Suffice to say, they wouldn’t like the idea of us sharing the same space they do. ”

“What, like we’re trespassers on their property?” I asked. The man began eyeing a particularly thick thread above a young woman’s head.

“Like we’re ants in their kitchen,” he said. He readied the scissors; then, with a swift motion he closed the scissors around the young woman’s thread. The thread, however, resisted; he gave it another try, but the thread remained uncut.

“Maybe you need new scissors,” I offered.

“Scissors - is that what your brain is interpreting? Not too far off, metaphorically.”

“Then what are you actually -”

“Shush.”

The man took a deep breath as he readied the scissors around the young woman’s thread again. I looked at her face; her black hair was braided, and her ivory skin and features reminded me of pictures of Sub-Saharan women. Her face, however, was screwed in discomfort, her eyes scrunched tightly shut. With a mighty grunt and heave, the man tried the scissors again; this time the thread gave. It faded as the young woman’s face relaxed, but returned sooner than the old woman’s had.

“I’m hoping that’s enough to stop this one,” he said, wiping his brow. “But a stubborn enough mind can overcome any barriers the brain puts up against it for its own good. You’ve been a headache and a half the last while, let me tell you. I bet you anything this young lady is the next one to come bother me.”

“Are you erasing people’s dreams?” I asked.

“Smart lad,” he said. “Most people erase their own dreams - the ones that need erasing - but I’m helping the stubborn ones along.”

“And your erasing dreams is saving us all,” I said.

“You got it.” I thought he might add to that, but he returned to wandering through the field of heads. I kept following him.

“And how exactly does that work?”

“Well, since you asked,” he said, squatting to inspect a man’s head, “most dreams and nightmares are the leftovers of your brain working while you sleep. But not all dreams. Some,” and he pointed to the sky, “reach out to them, getting horrible glimpses of what’s out there. Oh, you can’t comprehend what you’re seeing and feeling, of course, like a termite doesn’t understand a volcanic eruption. But you know it’s bad. You brain can’t handle it - so, it erases your memory of the dream when you wake up, and you’re able to continue with your day instead of crawling into a corner and going insane.”

I didn’t know what to say - all I could do was stand there.

“Let me tell you,” he continued, “you’ve done your fair share of hollering.”

“I don’t remember having any sorts of dreams like what you mentioned,” I said.

“Exactly.”

Evidently satisfied, the man left the thread above the man’s head alone.

“Problem is,” and he wiped his brow, “if too many of those outreaching dreams go unchecked - especially the dreams of persistent fools like yourself - it could alert them. And we don’t want that.”

“You’ve gotta tell me,” I persisted, “who are they?”

Suddenly, there was a rumbling from the sky. The man and I looked up - in the infinite sky, one of what I had assumed were galaxies began to mutate - it began to turn different colors as cosmic tendrils started to emerge from it, stretching out heaven knows how many hundreds of light-years. The rumbling was soon replaced with a roar - an eldritch cry, defying the vacuum of space, like from the pits of a thousand dying stars. All the people in the ground began screaming - still the cosmic tendrils grew longer in the sky. I could hear screams for miles and miles, from thousands of people all with their eyes tightly closed. My word, the screams - if you’ve never heard a crowd of people screaming, I can promise you there is nothing like it. It will never leave you.

“I thought about them too much, I shouldn’t have thought so much,” the man muttered to himself, and for the first time, I detected a hint of fear in his voice. “Kid, start thinking about something else. Movies or women or whatever.”

I sure tried. The man began to take measured breaths; we stood there for a few minutes, but soon the roaring died off; the screams of the people in the ground became lesser and lesser, and soon the “galaxy” resorted back to its previous appearance. The man breathed a sigh of relief.

“That was a bad one,” said the man. “Plenty of people won’t be remembering their dreams tonight.” And after glancing one more time into the sky, he resumed his seemingly-endless task.

For several minutes, I followed him in silence; I considered everything that I had seen, and mulled it over. Finally, after much deliberation, I told him:

“I want to learn everything.”

Even if I couldn’t distinguish his features, I knew that he was looking at me like I was an idiot.

“After that, you still want to know more?” he said incredulously. “I’m not going to tell you anymore, because I promise you, you’ll be happier not having the knowledge.”

“Why not?” I insisted.

“How do you think I got stuck here, wiseguy?” he breathed scathingly between his teeth. “If you want to be trapped here for eternity, fine, I’ll tell you everything - only you don’t seem great company. So, is that what you want? To be trapped here until the universe falls in on itself or until we’re all devoured?”

I allowed that it wasn’t.

“Well,” I continued, “is there anything more you could safely tell me?”

“If it’ll get you to shut up,” he sighed wearily, “I’ve got something I could show you. Don’t know if you’ll remember it when you wake up; that’s a decision you’ll have to make for yourself in a bit. You’re probably too far in for your subconscious to do that for you.”

“I’ll remember it,” I assured him. “I’ve already made that decision.”

The man chuckled.

“Don’t make promises you’re not sure you can keep.”

The man put down his scissors. He brought his hands up next to his ears - and slowly, he began to peel away his face.

***

I woke up in a cold sweat - my sheets were soaked in what I hoped was just my own perspiration. I looked at my phone; it was four in the morning. For hours I laid there - but there was no way I could go back to sleep the way my mind was racing. So, I pulled up my laptop and wrote this.

I’ve racked my brain, I’ve meditated, I’ve done everything I can think of. But no matter what, I just can’t remember what I saw when the man peeled away his face.