From within the sleep - a short cosmic horror

If I had been more awake, I might have seen it. Sleep has taken me.

No, it is not sleep itself. Or is it?

Let me explain myself while there is still time. This began with my

experiments in lucid dreaming, a practice I took up for the amusement of

it more than any more rational motivation.  Lucid dreaming is a simple

enough practice, but for myself I decided to use artificial aids. Doing

some research online I settled on a regimine of Galantamine starting at

4mg per day and escalating up to 30mg slowly over the course of several

months in addition to 5-HTP as a general sleeping aid.

At first the benefits were obvious: I was slowly finding my dreams

increasingly more vivid and my mild depression, a constant companion

throughout my adult life, began to lift.

My first real breakthrough occurred about 6 months after beginning my

experiments. I retired to bed early in the morning and closed my eyes,

finding myself fading into the dreamworld.  What I saw was as surreal

as any other dream, but made ever more vivid by the chemical aids I had

ingested. I found myself floating without a body in an enormous black

abyss, the size of which I could feel was beyond description. Floating

through the abyss I witnessed strange overlapping geometric shapes which

appeared to my eyes impossible. This was the trigger that signalled to

my mind that I was in fact asleep and I was able to make this realisation

for the first time without awakening to mundane reality.

How funny is the effect of sleep upon the human brain. We dream things

that defy all logic and sense, and yet we accept them as real until

we awaken - for our brains are both actively generating the imagery

and yet paradoxically not active enough for our rational faculties to

realise that what is happening does not make sense. All my life I have

had dreams of this nature, as have you no doubt.

Lucidity alters things however - once one is lucid, the illogical is

noticed, and if one is skilled and practiced, it can be altered and

manipulated. It is possible to feel the joy of rising above the limits

reality places upon us, flying freely through the skies and exploring

memories of places and people long lost to the waking world. In the

dreamworld, reality is no prison.

It is amusing to me that scientific knowledge brings us to this state

more efficiently - this state in which the basic principals of logic

and the fundamental rules of reality are no more.

Perhaps I should instead say that it WAS amusing to me, for I no

longer wish to ever see that reality and dread the coming darkness of

sleep. Chemical stimulation holds it back only so long.

In that first lucid experience, upon realising that I was in a state of

sleep and dreaming I exerted my first true control over my reality and

summoned into being another geometric marvel which could not exist in the

waking world, unchained from the rules of Euclid of Alexandria. Describing

it is still a task that remains impossible, it is truly something one

can only understand through direct experience, though the elation of

surpassing such fundamental laws of reality is very much within the

grasp of the written word.

Though I am not a religious or spiritual man, what I felt can only be

described in those terms: a deep spiritual joy. In summoning something

so unnatural, I paradoxically felt I had begun to understand the hidden

aspects of nature itself, those higher dimensions that exist only in

theory were here exposed as very real indeed, and I felt this experience

was the highpoint of my life.

Of course there are still certain limits within the dreamworld, one of

which is that one must eventually awaken back to reality, and that is

what happened to me and ended my experience. Although the experience had

ended, I remained elated and chronicled the experience within my journal.

In my waking state I held no delusions about the nature of my experience:

though profound, it was still fundamentally a creation of my mind,

or so I assumed.

The human eye is naturally capable of perceiving a minute amount of the

electromagnetic spectrum: from 390 to 700nm without artificial aid. On top

of this limitation, we are capable of operating only within 4 dimensions:

3 spatial, 1 temporal. Not only are we incapable of perceiving more than

this directly, we are limited to certain environmental conditions: we

require an oxygen-rich atmosphere and an earth-like gravity if we are to

survive. Going beyond these limits is possible, but not by far. Astronauts

routinely experience environments in which gravity is weakened, though

still ever-present. We can use artificial aids to survive in oxygen-free

environments and we can even expand our perceptions by minute amounts

through the use of technology that translates the wider electromagnetic

spectrum into the narrow slice of it our eyes can perceive. There are

experiments which enable human beings to modify their retinas for the

perception of very slightly more of the EM spectrum, but still within

a minute portion of it.

When we look around our environment, our retinas respond to the

bombardment of photons bouncing off the world around us, photons which

due to their dualistic nature manifest as waveforms of a set wavelength

within the EM spectrum. We make use of our technology to detect radiation

outside of the visible portion, and we can use technology to glimpse at

projections of higher dimensions in much the same way as we routinely

create projections of 3D spatial topologies onto the 2D planes of the

average computer display - but we have no means to directly perceive

outside these limits.

I therefore assumed that my dream manifestation was a product of

imagination, for my mind could have no direct knowledge of higher

dimensional constructs and my brain contains no neural circuits capable of

processing them. Should anything exist that allows visible light to pass

through it while reflecting only higher wavelengths of the EM spectrum,

it will be invisible to human beings.

Such a being that reflects higher wavelengths only within higher

dimensional positions would also remain invisible to our technology.

We however would be both visible and vulnerable to such a being. A being

whose very existence we can only glimpse at from beneath the curtain of

sleep, if my experience is anything to go by.

It has been said that evolution is akin to an alien god - a force that

slowly over millenia transforms living beings, making them ever more

adapted to their environments, with no motivations and no intelligence

at work.

The alien god of evolution has used its power to create us and beings like

us - the animals and plants and microbes that populate our planet. All

life on earth is adapted to varying degrees to our planet.

One wonders what the alien god would create on other planets. For a start,

it would be unlikely to recreate DNA or any of the other fundamentals

of life on our earth.

Aliens, in other words, would truly be that: alien - truly alien,

perhaps in some ways beyond our comprehension.

You are most likely asking now why I take the time to explain this to

you. Allow me to explain.

First, what is the function of sleep? Sleep appears to hold two purposes:

it allows us to rest and heal, maintaining our body and our muscles,

and it also appears to allow our brains to organise the day's events for

storage into longterm memory. Dreams commonly consist of a mixture of

recently perceived events and thoughts and what appears to us to be random

nonsense, caused by the random activation of neurons while we sleep.

Dreams were created by the alien god of evolution so that we may adapt

better to life on our planet. But like many natural activities our

body drives us to, they can be hijacked. We have done this with food

and sex after all.  The vast majority of acts of sexual intercourse

engaged in by humanity are for the purposes of pleasure alone, we make

use of contraceptives to deceive the alien god of evolution - using the

neural circuits that evolved to reward procreation while making actual

procreation unlikely or even impossible.

Perhaps it would be accurate to say that like recreational sex and junk

food, lucid dreaming is another way in which we have deceived the alien

god of evolution. No longer are my dreams bound to the purpose of encoding

memory or the simple random firing of my neurons.

A curious thing about our universe is the nature of randomness: it

only truly exists in the form of quantum-level events, the raw chaos of

subatomic particles in the quantum foam.

Naturally, one might wonder if there is an external source of that

chaos. If indeed our universe has more dimensions than we directly

perceive, is it not possible that what we call "external" is in fact

simply a higher-dimensional construct that we can not perceive?

If evolution as an alien god is simply metaphorical, what of the

possiblity of a true alien god? A creature of intelligence in those

higher dimensions, playing with the quantum foam for reasons unknown

and unfathomable to us.

If such a being exists, is it feasible that our dreams are in fact

directed to a purpose? Whatever purpose that may be, it is clear that

such a being would not want us to be aware of it, and it is this thought

that haunted me momentarily as I began my next session of lucid dreaming.

That night, pondering imagined greater beings I swallowed my pills and

lay down to sleep as normal. Sleep took me back to that great abyss of

geometric shapes unfathomable to my waking mind.

It was not until later upon analysing my dream that I noticed it: a

subtle movement amongst the shapes, just out of the corner of my eye,

a sort of distortion of the environment, moving with some purpose.

Being lucid I could still not control the motion of this thing, it

appeared to move entirely with its own purpose, beyond the control of

my dreaming brain.

I lost memory of this strange thing until further experiences manifested

in the same manner. Each time I lay down to sleep, I dreamt of more

control, and yet this thing in the distance remained beyond my will

to control.

Perhaps it was merely a suggestion upon pondering strange beings -

a thought that comforted me at first.

But then I awoke to see this thing in my waking reality, and it is with

me now as I write this and I sense a will behind it - a being with desire,

willing me to lay down again.

It grows increasingly more manipulative of my surroundings and I fear

that it is something that has somehow returned into my waking world from

the dreamworld.

The ground outside is increasingly blacker where this thing has been,

but the blackness seems to have depth - a depth that I can not describe,

for it is a black abyss which is beyond our normal spatial dimensions.

As my sanity slips, I increasingly feel an urge to sleep yet feel no

fatigue - I feel this thing pass through my mind and the urge increases.

I will myself to remain awake, but my will is slowly failing.

I must not sleep.