ENTRY 00: 07/23/2023 - Dizziness, Unconsciousness, & Dissociation

Okay, stop me if I sound a little weird, but have you ever spent a ton of time sitting/laying down, then got up really fast, perhaps stretched your arms a bit, and experienced a bout of like, dizziness, shakiness, and temporary blindness? I understand it has to do with a deficiency of certain nutrients combined with some kind of chicanery involving blood flow “catching up” to gravity or something. It’s something I experience somewhat frequently, perhaps every few months or so. I’m not generally able to predict when it’ll happen or not, but today was different, I was able to anticipate it in advance.

Bizarre as it sounds, I actually find these bouts of what could be described as very short bouts of fainting to be entertaining and somewhat pleasant. Well, pleasant is perhaps the wrong word to use, but I don’t dislike them. The more severe instances, where my limbs feel all tingly and the muscles in my hands start to shake as I involuntarily, limply, sit back down, are intriguing to me rather than alarming. I’ve also noticed that these more severe incidents can have a mental component as well as a physical one.

Today, for instance, I experienced a bout of this phenomena which seemed to halt time for a short while, as I had like, a dozen different thoughts and images play out in my head all at once. I was simultaneously thinking back to what I was just doing before getting up and following an immersive bit of daydreaming along with remembering what I was about to do, completely detached from reality for what must have been a few seconds before suddenly coming back to my senses sitting on my chair, remembering very little of the whole ordeal as if I had just awoken from a dream.

I don’t know exactly why, but I sometimes find myself seeking such experiences. My ability to immerse myself in a daydream or focus on internal activity rather than external has declined much since my childhood, but my desire to utilize my imagination for entertainment purposes has remained the same. I know it’s probably unhealthy, given that escapism can quickly become a trap rather than a useful coping mechanism, but even above and beyond my base instinct to escape from the harsh parts of reality I find it disappointing that my access to the internal space of my own mind is as limited as it is, especially when contrasted with how much time I spent in there as a kid.

Naturally, this “decline in imaginative capacity”, as I’ll call it, extends also to my dreams. I keep a dream journal to document my nightly goings-on, though I could stand to do a better job of sleeping to have an easier time remembering more dreams, and my habit is currently to record my dreams from the night before just prior to going to bed at the end of the day, so there are lot of holes in the record. I have been able to observe, in several years of dream data collection, many interesting (and annoying) patterns.

For one thing, I have very little control over the content of my dreams. I’ve experimented with mantras and focusing on concepts to influence my dreams as I go to sleep, and I’ve also dabbled in lucid dreaming. I had the most success with the latter, but lucid dreams happen to me infrequently, and my awareness within the dream is subpar, and complicated by various factors which I’ll get into. To put it simply, my mind is uncooperative and lame re: dreams.

Another thing I noticed is that my dreams are dreadfully boring most of the time. I hear often of wild and crazy dreams from my pals elsewhere on the information superhighway, whimsical situations and impossible feats of reality-bending. I’ve had no such luck.

My mind seems dead-set on giving me very mundane dreams, in which I wander through a mostly empty facsimile of some environment built out of bits and pieces of places I’ve been before. I can’t say I hate those dreams, given that I have a particular interest in all things liminal, and my natural curiosity gives me a drive (that I supress every day) to explore every corner of anywhere I visit, like some nosy player in Garry’s Mod. Such dreams clearly seek to fulfill that drive, but during the day I find myself much more interested in less realistic scenarios, of travel to and adventure in distant worlds (usually those ripped straight from fiction I loved in my formative years (and still love now) and/or the fiction I’ve most recently consumed).

I think most people would naturally gravitate to daydreaming under these circumstances, but my ability to successfully do so for long, protracted periods is rather piss-poor nowadays, apart from the hours right after I get up from sleeping, and to a much lesser extent those just before I retire to bed.

Due to my habit of feeding my attention a near-constant feed of interesting things, I’m also usually constantly busy with other things, so my overall time spent dicking around in my head is depressingly small, and the effort required to get my mind off of the daily goings-on is usually just insurmountable enough that even if I attempt to immerse myself, for instance at the end of a day before bed, I usually fail to do so.

This bugs me greatly, and my forays into the world of dreams were something I hoped would allow me to circumvent the problem. No such luck. Just a few days back, I had one of the first successful lucid dreams I’d had in probably almost a year. My awareness was just such that I could almost tell I was in a dream, but not quite to the extent that I realized I was free to do as I pleased. I, of course, needed proof. How foolish I was.

My confidence in my lucid state evaporated when I tried to phase through a door on my way out of the house towards adventure and all manner of shenanigans. Nevermind that the door detached from its hinges by itself shortly after my attempt to pass through it and subsequent moment of confusion at my failure. Naturally, I sought the one tool I knew could resolve the situation: an advanced dreaming technique known as a “Reality Check”.

The basic principle is to do something strange, offbeat, and physically impossible, to prove to oneself that one is either dreaming or not. In waking reality, such attempts universally fail, but in the dream…

Unfortunately for me, my mind was wise to my chicanery, and my choice of reality check, sadly the wrong one. Normally, the traditional method is to hold up one’s hand in the air and count one’s fingers. The number should come to five in the real world, but in the dream, one’s eyesight and the consistency of detailed objects is a little wibbly, and it becomes very difficult to count, let alone find exactly no more or less than five fingers on the hand. It’s an effective technique, to be sure, I’ve had plenty of success with it in the past.

But nooooooooo. I had to get fancy with it and try a technique as-yet unproven in the theatre of my mind. I elected to try pushing my index finger through my palm instead. The idea here is, in a dream, one is liable to push their finger through their hand, while in reality the finger will never accomplish this.

Alas, I pushed and I pushed, but my finger did not pass through. I felt a little dumb, thinking I was about to get up to all sorts of hoo-hah. I, slightly embarrassed, changed my expectations for the entire rest of the dream, and it ended shortly after.

Even now, I feel insulted by the whole thing. My brain really had to rain on my parade and apply real physics to physical objects purely for the purpose of stopping me from having too much fun. For someone who loves fantasy, unrealistic scenarios, and fictional, impossibly cool shit, it’s a serious bummer to not be able to taste a little of it in the realm of the mind from time to time.

I suppose then that it isn’t any wonder I find myself not minding a little intermittent unconsciousness in the form of fainting when I get up too fast, given that it seems to be the only way for me to find any novelty in the theatre of the mind.

Actually, that might be a bit unfair to say, but nonetheless, this issue occupies my mind from time to time. It isn’t as if I never ever have interesting dreams, but the data shows that, 9 times out of 10, I’m more likely to have either unmemorable dreams or dreams where I wander through a mostly empty environment. It bugs the hell out of me.

You know what hurts the most? My internal, subconscious body image perfectly matches my current physical body in the waking world. What a godsdamned bummer. Not only do I have to put up with pretty lame dreams on a daily basis, but I also have to do so in my boring, generic human body. I couldn’t have anything cool, like claws or wings or a tail, or even, at the very least, less body hair and a cuter figure, no way, not me. Gotta have the exact same body I’ve been stuck in since Day 0. Nice. Cool.

It isn’t as if I haven’t flirted with imagining myself in other forms or with different features, either. Much as my focus and visual acuity needs work, I’ve got a great capacity for imagining phantom limbs and phantom sensations. You’d think that’d factor in when a dream comes along, but my brain apparently isn’t brave enough to try and extrapolate what a more detailed version of that might be like.

Anyway, my dreams are lame and boring and I’m mad about it. Also that weird fainting thing that happens when you get up too fast is cool and does funny things to my brain and senses. Call that a thesis statement of this post if you like.