It’s a strange thing, that odd occurrence when you go to sleep that happens to many people. You dream. There have been studies, thought, ideas and speculations about what happens and where we ‘go’ when it does. Some say it’s our astral self experiencing things on another type of reality. Others think it could just be a bunch of electrical impulses creating images and thoughts while we sleep. But whatever is actually going on, you can’t deny that some of the ideas are really quite interesting. If you like that sort of thing.

Night terrors – a strange experience for those who go through it, acting out terrifying events in your dream they say. I can only presume that the normal mechanism of our bodies and minds recognising and acknowledging the ‘separation time’ of sleep, is absent in those people. And when encountering something that requires a reaction in the dream world, the body reacts in the normal realm to the other stimuli. Perhaps.

Nightmares – perhaps the lead in to the night terrors, but for most people they stop at being acted out physically in this realm, yet can seem to occur in the other one as a thought process and seem as though it is being acted out. Perhaps in a virtual reality kind of way Matrix style, because that was all done in their head, lying in a chair, only the point of death physically transferred. So, same set up for nightmares and maybe even dreams, where you are ‘plugged in’ to wherever it is that we go, and your consciousness is transferred somewhere else. Maybe the nightmares are where you get trapped in between and you are in both which is where it gets extra weird. The films Nightmare on Elm Street spring to mind here, and if you know them, you’ll know why.

Sleep realm – it’s a strange thing, to think we are kind of absent from our lives for around 6-8 hours per day, although there are speculations by some that we do go somewhere else and have ‘experiences’ there too. So, living a dual life of sorts I guess, but a subconscious one you can’t remember when you emerge back into this one. Funny to think of the terminology for it all to – you wake ‘up’ and ‘fall’ asleep. Could it be that we go down somewhere for the resting phase, and rise up again for the awake phase?

Dreams – and what of that process that occurs when we are submerged into the subconscious, we call it dreaming, but what is it? Just a recreation of all the input our daily life throws at us, being downloaded at night for storage they say, just like a computer I guess taking a back-up or archiving information. But it really does seem to be more complex than that, and although studied, it appears we still don’t actually have a clue. I wonder sometimes if that’s part of why they want a chip in people’s heads, and to try and get into their heads as they put it, because it may just be access to the other ‘reality’ that is created through the sleep process. Maybe.

And that’s where the potentially terrifying bit comes in, that there is somewhere else you ‘go’, where you can’t control when, or how, or what and are at the mercy of that. And is it possible that once something knows you can move between the worlds, and is not maybe restricted by two states as we are with sleep and awake, that they move freely between the two. Either we bring something back with us, or it follows us, or possibly always had its own route. Things we can’t see with our open eyes, yet in our sleeping state, we appear to ‘see’ without having our eyes open, so what it is we are seeing with? And who is to say that something is not there just because we don’t ‘see’ it, we are calibrated to be able to view certain spectrums of light so maybe there are things there invisible to us, yet they are there. Being named as apparitions or ghosts perhaps when a glimpse is caught, or if someone has a slightly different ability to everyone else and can see more than others. You just never know…

(c) K Wicks