Redpilling your dream characters
One of the oldest dreams I can remember also happened to be a lucid dream in which I tried to redpill my father. I was walking down an empty avenue in an unnamed town when I met him sitting on a bench. I sat next to him. We had a heartfelt conversation that I cannot exactly remember, and then I felt like it was time to wake up. A bit saddened, I tried to explain to my father that he was a character in my dream and that I had to leave. He gave me a smile that felt like comprehension, but didn't answer.
In my adolescence, I learned about the concept of lucid dreaming and became familiar with the techniques used to voluntarily gain lucidity in my dreams. I've had a lot of fun since then, but I had never again tried to discuss metaphysics with people encountered in my sleep.
I recently discovered the experiments conducted by Tholey (1989)1, which explored the idea that our oneiric characters may possess an individuality of their own, given to them by our brain and separate from the one it gives us. This is not as mad as it sounds, since separate consciousnesses within the same brain are a well-studied phenomenon; one example being patients who underwent a split-brain surgery, although interpretations on the matter are not unanimous. Our consciousness in the dream realm could also be interpreted as separate from our woken one. The participants in the experiments were tasked with presenting their dream characters with small exercises, such as writing poetry, drawing their point of view, or teaching the dreamer the meaning of a word they were not familiar with. Some of the results are fascinating, but, because of the extremely subjective nature of dreams, I decided to try it out for myself.
Seeing as it had been a long time since I last actively induced lucidity in my sleep, it wasn't until last night that I had an opportunity to experiment with a dream character. He was a perfectly unremarkable man in the street. I had trouble remembering the methodology, so I thought of something to ask him that I didn't know the answer to. I used to know the capital cities of all the nations of the world, but have forgotten most of them, so I asked him if he knew the capital city of Nicaragua. He answered "Villa". The correct answer is Managua. But as I was checking it this morning, I saw that an old name for Managua was Leal Villa de Santiago de Managua. Villa apparently designates a locality smaller than a city (but not a village) in Spanish and is a common element of hispanophonic toponymy. I don't think much of it, other than that it's the kind of coincidence that probably fuels a lot of mystery and theories about our dreams, while illustrating the weakness of the protocol: how to be sure that new information learned during your sleep is not a mere forgotten memory? The next part of my night was maybe even more interesting.
I entered a dream set in an extra-large version of my old school refectory, filled with people of all kinds. I was in a state of half-lucidity, meaning that I knew I was dreaming, but still acted and thought in the flow of the dream, often in illogical ways. I was determined to redpill all the actors of that dream by telling them they were not real. None of them believed me, so I tried to prove it in different ways. I told a girl that an enormous pimple would appear on her forehead, and it did. But the crowd laughed instead of being impressed. I then told a boy that I could manifest anything I wanted in the palm of my hand, and asked him to name some objects. At his request, I manifested a ping-pong ball, a flower and some money, but he took me for a magician instead of the deity I had told them all I was. I got angry and left my body for an ethereal one. I was looking for convincing proof when a cook left the kitchen screaming and holding a piece of meat she had just cut out of a bigger one, on which was written "I am everywhere, I am everything". I didn't remember being the cause of that, but was satisfied when the whole refectory joined her screams of disbelief.
This was more of a fun dream than a real experiment testing the Tholey hypothesis: I was not lucid enough to have conversations with my characters that could be studied. However, it made me think of a subsidiary question: if I were to encounter a rational character in my dreams who was willing to talk to me, how could I prove to him that he is not real using conversation alone? And why would he not use the exact same arguments against me? This comes back to philosophy 101 and Descartes, as you've probably realized. However, dreams offer a better framework for psychology than philosophy, so this shall be left unresolved for now.
I intend to experiment again in the future with a more concrete agenda and some lucidity training.
Tholey, P. (1989). Consciousness and Abilities of Dream Characters Observed During Lucid Dreaming. ↩