This dream is recurrent. It always happens on the cusp of sleep, and sometimes several nights in a row, then not for several months afterwards. Moments before it begins I know myself to be awake, insomniac, and as I slip into the dream I believe I'm still conscious, dictating my own thoughts. The dream then follows the logic of my waking mind: there is nothing uncanny, everything is normal. I am walking in a street, or sitting at home, talking with a friend or getting on to a bus. The details are always banal.

The horror always starts suddenly.

It first happened when I was an adolescent. A dog-sized rat, sleek as oil and razor-toothed, erupted out of a carpet and tore into my groin. Now it's marginally more subtle: the steam from a kettle becomes toxic, the voltage from a television electrifies a living room.

And then I'm dying. The physical sensation is always of asphyxiation and electrification, and there's always a puncturing pain in my back, as though I'm being tickled beyond endurance by hands which are too large and gripping too tightly. Lights flash near my eyes and there's a furious commotion of noises: a radio is caught between stations, single notes blaring with the volume of klaxons; an electrical connection has come loose, buzzing discordantly; and voices are shouting, arguing, viciously whispering. My body then shakes uncontrollably. I feel as if my blood has become turbulent.

It's when I fall to the floor that I remember I'm still lying in bed. So I must be awake, though the lights and the noise and the shaking continue. I twist and arch my back to escape the pain. I grasp at Lynne's arm, digging my nails in to wake her. I try to scream, but I'm suffocating and can't make any sound.

Then I realise I've been here before. I recognise the dream and how to end it. As the convulsions intensify, I put all my efforts into opening my eyes. It's like trying to snap a switch, but I can't reach it, I haven't the strength. The turbulence worsens--seeming to come from my arms, my legs, and accelerating upwards--and I do believe I'm going to die, though not from any imaginary circumstance. I'm not dreaming. The physical agitation is real and will surely stop my heart or rupture some valve.

But when finally I do force myself awake (and it must always be forced, consciously willed) I find I'm lying just as I was, the sheets undisturbed, the room quiet, my body heavy on the bed. I haven't moved, I haven't reached out to Lynne, and my breathing is perfectly steady.

Something of the electricity remains, however, and whatever I now look at is likely to move, become animate, unpredictable. My waking mind is suddenly vulnerable to the logic of dreams.

When this happens after a daytime nap, and especially in summer, the hallucinations are often benign, loony-toon friendly and quick to dissolve. But at night they are terrifying, more real than waking, and I have to get up, switch on the lights, and wander the house until banality returns...

EDITOR'S NOTE

My first thought was undiagnosed epilepsy. But in Nicholas Royle's The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers' Dreams, this dream's source, most lucid dreams (OK, out of just 5) are frustrating--lucidity is nearly useless. They can't all be having fits. Is it that the writers are mostly Brits, with that infamous English repression? The unconscious may want to show the ego how it feels, getting frustrated so often. "How do YOU like being paralyzed!"

Just a theory, but I rarely see this theme online or in my own lucid dreams, where I can change a lot. Yet... I'm often reluctant to use lucid powers unilaterally; maybe that's the equivalent inhibition in my own subculture (California hippie: unlike the English we can indulge ourselves, but must take care not to hurt others.)

Such variations suggest that "In lucid dreams, you can do anything you want!" is a claim true only of certain personality types (see, I'm diplomatic; I didn't write "spoiled" or "American".) The dream may choose to honor requests for rewrites in plot, setting or character, but it's false that it must. Yet it is a truth universally acknowledged on lucid-dream websites that you can do anything. Ego is all.

Oh, wait. That describes all the web. Never mind.

--Chris Wayan