Now to the philosophy class.

The course was taught by an old bearded professor n

amed
Robinson, who always mumbled. I would go to the class, and he would mumble along
, and I
couldnt understand a _thing_. The other people in the class seemed to understand
him better,
but they didnt seem to pay any attention. I happened to have a small drill, about
onesixteenth-
inch, and to pass the time in that class, I would twist it between my fingers an
d drill
holes in the sole of my shoe, week after week.
Finally one day at the end of the class, Professor Robinson went wugga mugga mugg
a
wugga wugga . . . and everybody got excited! They were all talking to each other
and
discussing, so I figured hed said something interesting, thank God! I wondered wh
at it was?
I asked somebody, and they said, We have to write a theme, and hand it in in four
weeks.
A theme on what?
On what hes been talking about all year.
I was stuck. The only thing that I had heard during that entire term that I coul
d
remember was a moment when there came this upwelling,
muggawuggastreamofconsciousnessmugga wugga, and _phoom!_it sank back into chaos.
This stream of consciousness reminded me of a problem my father had given to me
many years before. He said, Suppose some Martians were to come down to earth, and
Martians never slept, but instead were perpetually active. Suppose they didnt hav
e this crazy
phenomenon that we have, called sleep. So they ask you the question: How does it
_feel_ to
go to sleep? What _happens_ when you go to sleep? Do your thoughts suddenly stop
, or do
they move less aanndd lleeessss rraaaaapppppiidddddlllllllly yy yy yy yy yy yy y
? How does
the mind actually turn off?
I got interested. Now I had to answer this question: How does the stream of
consciousness _end_, when you go to sleep?
So every afternoon for the next four weeks I would work on my theme, I would pul
l
down the shades in my room, turn off the lights, and go to sleep. And Id watch wh
at
_happened_, when I went to sleep.
Then at night, Id go to sleep again, so I had two times each day when I could mak
e
observationsit was very good!
At first I noticed a lot of subsidiary things that had little to do with falling
asleep. I
noticed, for instance, that I did a lot of thinking by speaking to my self inter
nally. I could also
imagine things visually .
Then, when I was getting tired, I noticed that I could think of two things at on
ce. I
discovered this when I was talking internally to my self about something, and _w
hile_ I was
doing this, I was idly imagining two ropes connected to the end of my bed, going
through
some pulleys, and winding around a turning cylinder, slowly lifting the bed. I w
asnt
_aware_ that I was imagining these ropes until I began to worry that one rope wo
uld catch
on the other rope, and they wouldnt wind up smoothly. But I said, internally, Oh,
the
tension will take care of that, and this interrupted the first thought I was havi
ng, and made
me aware that I was thinking of two things at once.
I also noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas continue, but they become less
and less
logically interconnected. You dont _notice_ that theyre not logically connected un
til you
ask yourself, What made me think of that? and you try to work your way back, and o
ften
you cant remember what the hell _did_ make you think of that!
So you get every _illusion_ of logical connection, but the actual fact is that t
he thoughts
become more and more cockeyed until theyre completely disjointed, and beyond that
, you
fall asleep.
After four weeks of sleeping all the time, I wrote my theme, and explained the
observations I had made. At the end of the theme I pointed out that all of these
observations
were made while I was _watching_ myself fall asleep, and I dont really know what
its like
to fall asleep when Im not watching myself. I concluded the theme with a little v
erse I
made up, which pointed out this problem of introspection:
_I wonder why . I wonder why ._
_I wonder why I wonder._
_I wonder why I wonder why _
_I wonder why I wonder!_
We hand in our themes, and the next time our class meets, the professor reads on
e of
them: Mum bum wugga mum bum . . . I cant tell what the guy wrote.
He reads another theme: Mugga wugga mum bum wugga wugga. . . I dont know
what that guy wrote either, but at the end of it, he goes:
_Uh wugga wuh. Uh wugga wuh._
_Uh wugga wugga wugga._
_I wugga wuh uh wugga wuh_
_Uh wugga wugga wugga._
Aha! I say . Thats _my _ theme! I honestly didnt recognize it until the end.
After I had written the theme I continued to be curious, and I kept practicing t
his
watching myself as I went to sleep. One night, while I was having a dream, I rea
lized I was
observing myself _in_ the dream. I had gotten all the way down into the sleep it
self!
In the first part of the dream Im on top of a train and were approaching a tunnel.
I get
scared, pull myself down, and we go into the tunnelwhoosh! I say to myself, So you
can
get the feeling of fear, and you can hear the sound change when you go into the
tunnel.
I also noticed that I could see colors. Some people had said that you dream in b
lack and
white, but no, I was dreaming in color.
By this time I was inside one of the train cars, and I can feel the train lurchi
ng about. I
say to myself, So you can get kinesthetic feelings in a dream. I walk with some di
fficulty
down to the end of the car, and I see a big window, like a store window. Behind
it there arenot
mannequins, but three live girls in bathing suits, and they look pretty good!
I continue walking into the next car, hanging onto the straps overhead as I go,
when I
say to myself, Hey ! It would be interesting to get excitedsexually so I think Ill g
o back
into the other car. I discovered that I could turn around, and walk back through
the trainI
could control the direction of my dream. I get back to the car with the special
window, and I
see three old guys playing violinsbut they turned back into girls! So I could mod
ify the
direction of my dream, but not perfectly .
Well, I began to get excited, intellectually as well as sexually , saying things
like, Wow!
Its working! and I woke up.
I made some other observations while dreaming. Apart from always asking myself,
Am I _really _ dreaming in color? I wondered, How accurately do you see something?
The next time I had a dream, there was a girl lying in tall grass, and she had r
ed hair. I
tried to see if I could see _each_ hair. You know how theres a little area of col
or just where
the sun is reflectingthe diffraction effect, I could see _that_! I could see each
hair as sharp
as you want: perfect vision!
Another time I had a dream in which a thumbtack was stuck in a doorframe. I see
the
tack, run my fingers down the doorframe, and I feel the tack. So the seeing depar
tment
and the feeling department of the brain seem to be connected. Then I say to myself
,
Could it be that they _dont_ have to be connected? I look at the doorframe again,
and theres
no thumbtack. I run my finger down the doorframe, and I _feel_ the tack!
Another time Im dreaming and I hear knock-knock; knock-knock. Something was
happening in the dream that made this knocking fit, but not perfectly it seemed s
ort of
foreign. I thought: Absolutely guaranteed that this knocking is coming from _outs
ide_ my
dream, and Ive invented this part of the dream to fit with it. Ive _got_ to wake u
p and find
out what the hell it is.
The knocking is still going, I wake up, and . . . Dead silence. There was nothin
g. So it
wasnt connected to the outside.
Other people have told me that they have incorporated external noises into their
dreams, but when I had this experience, carefully watching from below, and _sure_
the
noise was coming from outside the dream, it wasnt.
During the time of making observations in my dreams, the process of waking up wa
s a
rather fearful one. As youre beginning to wake up theres a moment when you feel ri
gid
and tied down, or underneath many layers of cotton batting. Its hard to explain,
but theres a
moment when you get the feeling you cant get out; youre not sure you can wake up.
So I
would have to tell myselfafter I was awakethat thats ridiculous. Theres no disease I
know
of where a person falls asleep naturally and cant wake up. You can _always_ wake
up. And
after talking to myself many times like that, I became less and less afraid, and
in fact I found
the process of waking up rather thrillingsomething like a roller coaster: After a
while youre
not so scared, and you begin to enjoy it a little bit.
You might like to know how this process of observing my dreams stopped (which it
has
for the most part; its happened just a few times since). Im dreaming one night as
usual,
making observations, and I see on the wall in front of me a pennant. I answer fo
r the twenty-
fifth time, Yes, Im dreaming in color, and then I realize that Ive been sleeping wit
h the
back of my head against a brass rod. I put my hand behind my head and I feel tha
t the back
of my head is _soft_. I think, Aha! _Thats_ why Ive been able to make all these
observations in my dreams: the brass rod has disturbed my visual cortex. All I h
ave to do is
sleep with a brass rod under my head, and I can make these observations any time
I want.
So I think Ill stop making observations on this one, and go into deeper sleep.
When I woke up later, there was no brass rod, nor was the back of my head soft.
Somehow I had become tired of making these observations, and my brain had invent
ed
some false reasons as to why I shouldnt do it anymore.
As a result of these observations I began to get a little theory. One of the rea
sons that I
liked to look at dreams was that I was curious as to how you can see an image, o
f a person,
for example, when your eyes are closed, and nothings coming in. You say it might
be
random, irregular nerve discharges, but you cant get the nerves to discharge in e
xactly the
same delicate patterns when you are sleeping as when you are awake, looking at s
omething.
Well then, how could I see in color, and in better detail, when I was asleep?
I decided there must be an interpretation department. When you are actually lookin
g
at somethinga man, a lamp, or a wallyou dont just see blotches of color. Something
tells
you what it is; it has to be interpreted. When youre dreaming, this interpretatio
n department
is still operating, but its all slopped up. Its telling you that youre seeing a hum
an hair in the
greatest detail, when it isnt true. Its interpreting the random junk entering the
brain as a
clear image.
One other thing about dreams. I had a friend named Deutsch, whose wife was from
a
family of psychoanalysts in Vienna. One evening, during a long discussion about
dreams, he
told me that dreams have significance: there are symbols in dreams that can be i
nterpreted
psychoanalytically. I didnt believe most of this stuff, but that night I had an i
nteresting
dream: Were playing a game on a billiard table with three ballsa white ball, a gre
en ball,
and a gray balland the name of the game is titsies. There was something about tryin
g to
get the balls into the pocket: the white ball and the green ball are easy to sin
k into the pocket,
but the gray one, I cant get to it.
I wake up, and the dream is very easy to interpret: the name of the game gives i
t away,
of course-thems girls! The white ball was easy to figure out, because I was going
out,
sneakily, with a married woman who worked at the time as a cashier in a cafeteri
a and wore
a white uniform. The green one was also easy, because I had gone out about two n
ights
before to a drive-in movie with a girl in a green dress. But the gray one-what t
he hell was the
gray one? I knew it _had_ to be _somebody _; I _felt_ it. Its like when youre tryi
ng to
remember a name, and its on the tip of your tongue, hut you cant get it.
It took me half a day before I remembered that I had said goodbye to a girl I li
ked very
much, who had gone to Italy about two or three months before. She was a very nic
e girl, and
I had decided that when she came back I was going to see her again. I dont know i
f she wore
a gray suit, but it was perfectly clear, as soon as I thought of her, that she w
as the gray one.
I went back to my friend Deutsch, and I told him he must be rightthere _is_ somet
hing
to analyzing dreams. But when he heard about my interesting dream, he said, No, t
hat one
was too perfecttoo cut and dried. Usually you have to do a bit more analysis.