Last night I dreamed that I was a spy, running through an airport on a mission with a fellow spy and trying to avoid being hunted down by rival spies. It was pretty exciting. While evading a German assassin, we realized that we weren’t wearing our shoes. We ran back to the room where we had left them, because it would be too suspicious if we went through the airport in only socks. While we were looking under tables and chairs for our shoes, I looked down and saw that I was already wearing mine. Incongruity.
“Do you know what this means?” I said to my cohort. “We’re in a dream.”
“Well, if we’re dreaming, I’m going to wake up now,” she said.
“No, I don’t want to!” I said. “Let’s keep going, this is fun. We can do anything we want!” I kept running in hopes that some more spy missions would materialize, but unfortunately the assassin disappeared and the adventure was over.
I’ve read a bit about lucid dreaming, and it seems unappealing to me because it robs dreams of their stakes if you know you are dreaming. The high stakes of believing in the world of dreams is precisely what makes them so enjoyable to me. That time I was cornered by bad guys, my gun malfunctioned and a handsome stranger came to my rescue, and then I drove a van full of Ebola out of a crowded village? I totally thought I was going to die. It was thrilling.
This thought is not fully formed 