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 couldn t understand a _thing_. The other people in the class seemed to understand him better, but they didn t seem to pay any attention. I happened to have a small drill, about onesixteenthinch, 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 he d 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 he s 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 didn t 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 I d watch wh at _happened_, when I went to sleep. Then at night, I d go to sleep again, so I had two times each day when I could mak e observations it 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 asn t _aware_ that I was imagining these ropes until I began to worry that one rope wo uld catch on the other rope, and they wouldn t 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 don t _notice_ that they re 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 can t 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 they re 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 don t really know what it s like to fall asleep when I m 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 can t tell what the guy wrote. He reads another theme: Mugga wugga mum bum wugga wugga. . . I don t 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 . That s _my _ theme! I honestly didn t 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 I m on top of a train and we re approaching a tunnel. I get scared, pull myself down, and we go into the tunnel whoosh! 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 excited sexually so I think I ll g o back into the other car. I discovered that I could turn around, and walk back through the train I could control the direction of my dream. I get back to the car with the special window, and I see three old guys playing violins but 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! It s 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 there s a little area of col or just where the sun is reflecting the 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 _don t_ have to be connected? I look at the doorframe again, and there s no thumbtack. I run my finger down the doorframe, and I _feel_ the tack! Another time I m 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 I ve invented this part of the dream to fit with it. I ve _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 wasn t 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, the noise was coming from outside the dream, it wasn t.

and _sure_

During the time of making observations in my dreams, the process of waking up wa s a rather fearful one. As you re beginning to wake up there s a moment when you feel ri gid and tied down, or underneath many layers of cotton batting. It s hard to explain, but there s a moment when you get the feeling you can t get out; you re not sure you can wake up. So I would have to tell myself after I was awake that that s ridiculous. There s no disease I know of where a person falls asleep naturally and can t 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 thrilling something like a roller coaster: After a while you re 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; it s happened just a few times since). I m dreaming one night as usual, making observations, and I see on the wall in front of me a pennant. I answer fo r the twentyfifth time, Yes, I m dreaming in color, and then I realize that I ve 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! _That s_ why I ve 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 I ll 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 shouldn t 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 nothing s coming in. You say it might be random, irregular nerve discharges, but you can t 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 something a man, a lamp, or a wall you don t just see blotches of color. Something

tells you what it is; it has to be interpreted. When you re dreaming, this interpretatio n department is still operating, but it s all slopped up. It s telling you that you re seeing a hum an hair in the greatest detail, when it isn t true. It s 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 didn t believe most of this stuff, but that night I had an i nteresting dream: We re playing a game on a billiard table with three balls a white ball, a gre en ball, and a gray ball and 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 can t 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-them s 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. It s like when you re tryi ng to remember a name, and it s on the tip of your tongue, hut you can t 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 don t 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 right there _is_ somet hing to analyzing dreams. But when he heard about my interesting dream, he said, No, t hat one was too perfect too cut and dried. Usually you have to do a bit more analysis.