It was a warm summer night. Standing on the porch, I could see the house across the street dimly lit by sodium streetlights. In the garden, a warm breeze set the leaves in rippling motion. I could feel it whispering across the hair on my arms.
The funny thing was, I couldn’t remember getting out of bed and opening the front door.
Feeling slightly ridiculous, I attempted a small exercise in reality-testing. I lifted my arms and willed myself upward. My feet left the ground and I watched the porch and garden recede below me.
I woke up with a start. The lucid dream I had just astonished myself out from was indistinguishable in fine-grained realism to the waking world.
This was a few years ago. The other day I stood looking out the living room window at another grey day. Raindrops pinged off the driveway.
There was the house across the street, in broad daylight. But no waking up from this: my neighbour there recently died from a brain tumour.
He was a 34-year-old high school science teacher and father of two. Beekeeping and maple tree tapping were part of his hands-on practice of sustainable living. Always prepared to help neighbours, he even built an extra garden bed in his backyard for my wife and I to grow vegetables.
I accompanied him on walks and visits to the gym in his final months, even as cancer began to rob him of mobility and vision.
Some are certain that death is oblivion: when the brain is finally switched off, the mind winks out like the screen on an old cathode ray television. Others are convinced that consciousness somehow survives death.
Then there’s people like me: allergic to fixed beliefs but open to new information and experiences.
My life has spanned the time of pocket calculators and the era of smartphones with more computing power than the Apollo moon missions.
So I’m fascinated with how impossibilities become pedestrian, and dreams reality. And I’m amused at the epic fails of past “experts” to predict the future.
In the early 19th century, a professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College in London deemed rail travel at high speed impossible because air would be forced out of cabins and passengers would die of asphyxia.
“A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere,” insisted the New York Times in 1936. “This is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The [atomic] bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives,” fulminated American Admiral William D. Leahy during the Second World War. “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home,” concluded Ken Olson, president of a ’70s firm that made business mainframe computers.
So much for secular-based prophecy. And ironically, in doing their best to exorcise magic from the world, scientists have only succeeded in chasing it out to the edges of space or down to subatomic scales, where an electron can be two places at the same time and violate laws that work for beads and baseballs.
The more we try pin down nature, the more “she recedes into the Land of Quarks, leaving nothing behind but the shadow of materialism itself,” wrote Patrick Harpur in his 2002 book The Philosopher’s Secret Fire. “It is not so much that the objects which rationalism reflects become irrational; it’s more that the mirror of rationalism itself distorts, sending back weird images of astral enormities and bizarre quantum events,” he writes.
My point is that we live in a technological world that, by the measures of previous generations, is utterly dreamlike — and occasionally nightmarish. Furthermore, the entities that compose our cosmos behave more like the mercurial beings of folklore and mythology than billiard balls colliding on a pool table.
The fixed beliefs of my youth have loosened with age (my teeth will surely follow). As the saying goes, the one thing certain about life is that no one gets out alive.
That said, I’d like to think that after his anxiety and pain, my friend and neighbour Gord peacefully slipped from one dream to another.
That we live in a universe of doorways rather than dead ends: is that what’s hinted at by lucid dreaming?
geoffolson.com
