My eyes were open. I could think clearly. I knew where I was. But I could still feel the object I had been holding moments earlier, in a dream that had ended. I couldn’t seem to move my arm into view, and I felt almost nothing from the rest of my body.
For a few extraordinary moments, what we ordinarily call “being awake” appeared to have come apart into its constituent pieces.
This happened after I had been dreaming that I was holding a gun. As I lay there in bed, eyes open and apparently awake, I noticed I could still feel the gun in my hand. I remembered the sensation clearly: it felt plastic and fake, even though in the dream it had been functional.
So now I was confused. Why was I apparently holding a gun here in bed—the same one from my dream?
I moved my arm downward to bring it into my line of sight. But no matter how much I tried to move it, my arm never appeared. It remained up and to the right, out of sight.
The sensation was unique: moving a body part, feeling oneself move it, yet never seeing it enter the visual field. It was not as though I felt the arm pass invisibly across my vision. Even my proprioception, although it told me the arm was moving, never registered any change in its position.
So there I was in bed, having awakened from a dream, trying to see what I was holding that felt like a gun—yet no amount of motor effort could make my arm budge from where it seemed to be. I was perplexed, a little annoyed, and perhaps mildly concerned. Why was my motor system failing? And what was in my hand?
Then a wave of sensation spread across my body. I could feel it coursing over my skin. I believe this was the moment my somatosensory and motor systems woke up and I could once again feel my actual body.
What returned was merely the ordinary sensation of having lain in the same position for a long time. We barely think of it as a sensation at all. It is part of the baseline we normally ignore. But before it returned, I had felt none of it. My bodily sensation had apparently been switched off, and so when this mild, boring feeling of almost nothing came rushing back, it felt intense.
Only then did I realize that, before that moment, I had felt nothing across my body at all.
This appears to have been a variety of lucid dreaming in which my visual and cognitive systems had awakened, while my somatomotor system—and perhaps even parts of my visuomotor or dorsal-stream system—had not.
I was half awake, but not in the ordinary sense of occupying some fuzzy boundary between sleeping and waking. Rather, half of my brain seemed fully awake while the other half remained fully asleep.
Whether that interpretation is exactly right or not, the experience left me with a deeper appreciation for just how many independent systems have to work together to produce the seemingly simple experience of being awake. We think of wakefulness as a single switch. For a few unforgettable moments, I experienced it instead as a collection of distinct faculties that had briefly fallen out of sync.
It's been awhile since I had a lucid dream. I used to have them more frequently. There's something to our state of being that I've read about that will produce more of them.
One of the things I discovered I could do and then began doing in my lucid dreams was take over the 'director's chair' in the 'movie' that the dream was. When something in the dream sequence produced a bad outcome, sometimes really bad outcomes I would hit 'rewind' in my dream back to a point where I could make a different choice and avoid the bad outcome as the dream sequence restarted, "Action!" Sometimes no matter what choice I made the same bad outcome would result in the dream sequence. So I'd rewind back to another point further back where I could make a different choice and avoid the bad outcome in the dream sequence. I found I could do this over and over and over in the lucid dreaming state, still not awake, eyes closed, not fully conscious. But able to sit in that dream 'director's chair' and go through multiple different dream sequences until I would finally find the moment in the dream that the 'bad' choice was made that resulted in the bad outcome that no other subsequent different choices would prevent.
I would refuse to let myself have a full-on nightmare. I would find where things were put into motion that the dream was going to end up in a nightmare and choose differently. Often it wasn't an obvious choice.
In thinking about dream analysis of when it would happen there was often a learning experience that accompanied the dream that was meaningful for me to think about what was going on in my life at the time and clarified the need to make different choices when presented with options. And once you know you can occupy the 'director's chair' in a lucid dream it becomes much easier to do the next time. Kinda cool. I'm sure there's many who study dreaming and could add insights.