Untitled
Untitled is a narrative piece based on an out-of-body experience I had during the fall of 2007. I’ve been a longtime practitioner of a discipline called lucid dreaming that involves forcing consciousness of the dream state while in a dream. After becoming aware that one is in a dream state, the dream can be rationally manipulated and controlled, and the dreamscape logically charted and explored.
Usually a lucid state can only be entered from within a dream after some period of non-lucidity, but I had read about an exciting technique called Wake-Initiation of Lucid Dreams (WILD) that I wanted to try. The technique has the dreamer enter a state of self-produced sleep paralysis while still conscious. From this state dreaming can be entered freely and, because there is no break in the stream of consciousness, a lucid dream is achieved immediately.
After several months of failed attempts I finally managed to produce a state of sleep paralysis while counting backwards from 500 to 1 during a nap one afternoon. As I felt myself loose control of my body, a strange side effect began to emerge: my tinnitus, barely noticeable under normal conditions, was now deafeningly loud and continuing to grow louder. Additionally the beating of my heart was several times louder than normal. It was as if some filtering mechanism usually used by the brain to tune out low-level noise had shut itself off.
