Discontinuous Continuity in a Dream
Introduction:
Everybody dreams. Have you ever tried to write down accounts of your dreams? There was a time when I conducted a little “experiment of the mind”, where I would make it a point to try to write down what I could remember of the dreams that I had, shortly after awakening, while the memories were still fresh in my mind. After a while, I accumulated a number of written accounts of the dreams I had.
In this entry, I present an account which is based on a dream I had on the night of November 13, 2009. As best as I remember, it was one continuous dream, but it occurred in a series of different parts:
The Dream:
Part 1: The Crashing Jet
I dreamed that I was on a hill overlooking the ocean on a cool and cloudy day, when a military jet came into view. It began to fly erratically. At first I thought that it may have been a stunt, as I’ve seen in air shows before, but this jet was all alone, with no shows scheduled that I knew of. The jet continued its tumble and moved closer and closer to the water. It was becoming obvious that something was not right. Then the jet crashed into the water, not more than a half-mile offshore. There were swimmers near the shore that witnessed the event. The last thing I remember in this part of the dream is that the wreckage of the jet had been brought ashore with some heavy machinery. I don’t know if the pilot survived.
Part 2: Falling Off an Oceanside Cliff
Then I dreamed that I fell off of a cliff which overlooked the ocean, and fell down through the air for over a thousand feet or so. I saw the dark blue ocean with the breaking waves below, and I was falling closer and closer down to it. There was a sandy beach lining the shore, and I fell onto a part of the beach that had a slope to it, and was very loose and soft. I impacted the top part of the slope in a glancing manner, which sort of absorbed some of the fall, and then rolled down the slope, gradually coming to a stop. Although I was uncomfortable, I was able to get up and walk away from it.
Part 3: The Radio
Later, I stopped by the home of a fellow who lived right on a nearby rocky part of the beach. His house was constructed of stone, and the ocean waves crashed right at the foot of the boulders upon which the house was built. The glassless windows of the house looked out over the ocean, allowing the cool breezes to blow in. The owner had a radio that he was very proud of. It appeared to be of an older style, and could receive AM and FM stereo. It had a main unit, with a brown wooden cabinet, about the size of a large table radio, and an auxiliary speaker of the same size a few feet across the room from it. He had it playing softly in the background, but turned up the volume for me to hear it clearly. At that moment, a lively song came on over the station that it was tuned to, and I listened closely to see how good the sound really was. It had quite a full sound for a system with speakers that were rather small, and the stereo effect was good. It seemed to be pulling in the FM stereo signal pretty well for a location that was kind of behind some big oceanside cliffs, which would tend to block such signals. Then the signal grew weak, and the music was filled with static. The fellow tried to adjust the radio and retune the station, but couldn’t seem to get the signal back to normal. His pride was obviously on the line. So I looked at the radio closely. It had a lot of different controls on its front panel, which I thought was impressive for what looked to be a radio of older styling, and one of them was a switch that said “DX/LOCAL”. It was switched to “LOCAL”. I switched it to “DX”, and the signal became loud and clear again. Then the fellow smiled, relieved that his pride and joy was still in good working order.
NOTES ON THE EXPERIENCE OF THE DREAM: When I was “falling off of the cliff”, I could actually “feel” the sense of falling downwards, and also the feeling of vertigo that one gets when seeing a view from a high place. I could “feel” the impact go through my body when I “impacted on the sloping sands below, and rolled down the slope”.
The “cool ocean breezes that came in through the glassless windows of the house” actually “felt cool”, with a “tinge of dampness” to them! And the “music which was playing on the radio” actually “sounded” pretty good –
And so when I think of it, I am sometimes surprised at how “real” dreams can seem, when you are experiencing them. And then when you awaken, you can barely remember them, if at all…
PSYCHOLOGICAL NOTES: As best as I can recall, I did not awaken after each part of this dream (in the previous post, I kept waking up before those dreams came to a conclusion), but it seems that there were definite little “chapters” that made up the dream. I find it interesting that the “chapters” of the dream seemed to flow continuously into each other while I was experiencing the dream, even though they seem to be quite different from each other when written down as an account of the dream.
Dreams often seem to have many such strange characteristics to them, where time, space, and logic seem to be twisted up and distorted in a way, and yet, they somehow seem to fit together in the context of the dream. Could it be said that dreams are “Discontinuously Continuous” in their nature?
Discontinuous Continuity in a Dream