Living In A Lucid Dream | NOEMA

Claire L.

克莱尔·L。

Evans is a writer and musician exploring ecology, technology and culture.

埃文斯是一位探索生态、技术和文化的作家和音乐家。

The first time it happened, it was an accident.

第一次发生这种事，纯属意外。

But every dream is.

但每一个梦想都是如此。

It would have been my last REM cycle of the night, had I been able to sleep.

如果我能够入睡的话，这将是我当晚的最后一个快速眼动周期。

Instead, for the previous six hours, I had counted sheep, had dressed for imaginary occasions in my mind, had tried the Army sleep techniques, alternately imagined myself in a black velvet hammock and in a canoe on a calm, still lake.

相反，在过去的六个小时里，我数了羊，在脑海中想象了各种场合的着装，尝试了陆军睡眠技巧，交替想象自己躺在黑色天鹅绒吊床上和平静湖面上的独木舟里。

I’d meditated.

我沉思了一下。

I’d thought of my mother, a lifelong insomniac who has rarely slept more than four hours a night in her life.

我想起了我的母亲，她一生都失眠，每晚很少睡超过四个小时。

I’d tried everything and given up.

我尝试了一切然后放弃了。

All I could do was wait for morning.

我所能做的就是等待早晨。

The dream grabbed my ankles first, pulled at me like someone dislodging a drain.

梦首先抓住了我的脚踝，像有人推掉下水道一样拉着我。

Out it tossed me through my sliding glass window, over the garden, over my quiet street, over the dark sleeping skyline, a ragdoll flung into the Santa Anas.

它把我从滑动玻璃窗里扔了出去，飞过花园，飞过安静的街道，飞过沉睡的黑暗地平线，一个布娃娃被扔进了圣安娜。

I soared high enough to see Los Angeles’s motherboard of electric light.

我飞得足够高，看到了洛杉矶的电灯主板。

I could see the city in perfect detail below.

我可以在下面看到这座城市的完美细节。

I was asleep — no, I was awake!

我睡着了——不，我醒着！

I felt the cold whipping through my hair as I tumbled like a deflating balloon through the sky.

当我像泄了气的气球一样在天空中翻滚时，我感到寒冷掠过我的头发。

I felt the miles beneath me.

我感觉到脚下有几英里。

I felt the warm pillow beneath my cheek.

我感觉到脸颊下面有温暖的枕头。

I dove, flew, dipped, conscious of it all.

我潜入水中，飞翔，潜入水中，意识到这一切。

More than half of adults will have this experience or one like it at some point in their lives.

超过一半的成年人在一生中的某个时刻都会有过这种经历或类似的经历。

They’ll go to sleep, and as their REM cycles accumulate, as night shades into morning, as their sports car turns into a banana, they will suddenly realize, as I did: This is not real.

他们会去睡觉，随着他们的快速眼动周期的积累，随着夜晚进入早晨，当他们的跑车变成香蕉时，他们会像我一样突然意识到：这不是真实的。

This is a dream.

这是一个梦。

The flash of lucidity can come as quite a shock, enough to startle a novice into waking.

清醒的闪现可能会带来很大的冲击，足以让新手惊醒。

But if you can hang on and stay conscious, you’ll be in for the ride of your life.

但如果你能坚持下去并保持清醒，你将踏上人生的旅程。

After the first one, my curiosity was piqued.

第一个之后，我的好奇心被激发了。

I started lurking in online forums, reading accounts of similar experiences from communities of “ oneironauts ,” or dream explorers.

我开始潜伏在在线论坛中，阅读“oneironauts”（梦想探索者）社区中类似经历的描述。

From them I learned that lucid dreams need not be a fluke experience: I could cultivate and, with some practice, control them.

从他们那里我了解到，清醒梦不一定是一种侥幸的经历：我可以培养它们，并通过一些练习来控制它们。

The first thing I needed to do was establish a baseline awareness of the difference between waking and dreaming using a technique called “critical state testing.” This is how it works: Several times a day, ask yourself if what you are experiencing is a dream.

我需要做的第一件事是使用一种称为“临界状态测试”的技术建立对清醒和做梦之间差异的基线认识。它是这样运作的：每天几次，问问自己你所经历的是否是一个梦。

To make sure you’re awake, count your fingers.

为了确保你是醒着的，数数你的手指。

Plug your nose.

堵住你的鼻子。

Look at your watch, then look again to see if the numbers have moved.

看看你的手表，然后再看看数字是否移动了。

If you do this often enough, the habit will spill over into your dreams.

如果你经常这样做，这个习惯就会渗透到你的梦中。

And when it does, you’ll find that your fingers are jelly.

当它发生时，你会发现你的手指变成了果冻。

That you can breathe with your nose plugged.

你可以用鼻子堵住呼吸。

That your watch is unreadable.

你的手表无法读取。

“Dream standard time,” the psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge called it in his 1990 manual, “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming”: asleep and awake at once.

心理生理学家史蒂芬·拉伯奇 (Stephen LaBerge) 在其 1990 年出版的手册《探索清醒梦的世界》中将其称为“梦的标准时间”：同时睡着和醒着。

Lucid dreams are as ancient as the mind.

清醒梦与心灵一样古老。

They’ve long been central to the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition, which teaches the cultivation of conscious awareness even in deep sleep.

长期以来，它们一直是金刚乘佛教传统的核心，该传统教导即使在深度睡眠中也要培养意识。

In the West, the philosophical literature of lucidity reaches back to Aristotle .

在西方，关于清醒的哲学文献可以追溯到亚里士多德。

René Descartes, in his first “ Meditation ,” famously proposed that it’s impossible to prove the difference between dreaming and wakefulness on empirical grounds alone.

勒内·笛卡尔在他的第一部《冥想》中提出了一个著名的观点：仅凭经验是不可能证明做梦和清醒之间的区别的。

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote accounts of his own lucid dreams.

弗里德里希·尼采写下了他自己的清醒梦。

But in the modern sciences, the subject remained unexplored well into the 20th century.

但在现代科学中，这个课题直到 20 世纪仍未得到探索。

Even by the late 1970s, most scientists and psychologists believed that lucid dreams were the product of fleeting awakenings during sleep, misremembered in the morning.

即使到了 20 世纪 70 年代末，大多数科学家和心理学家仍然认为清醒梦是睡眠中短暂觉醒的产物，在早上被记错了。

The very idea of conscious awareness during sleep was considered impossible to measure.

睡眠期间的意识意识被认为是无法测量的。

After all, subjective accounts of dreamers couldn’t be quantified — how could a dreamer really know the difference between dreaming that they were conscious and actually being conscious?

毕竟，做梦者的主观描述是无法量化的——做梦者怎么可能真正知道梦见自己有意识和实际有意识之间的区别？

Anyone who has ever had a lucid dream knows this difference intuitively, but without a measurable physiological sign, lucidity was relegated to the anecdotal, subjective experience of dreamers.

任何曾经做过清醒梦的人都直观地知道这种差异，但由于没有可测量的生理信号，清醒度被降级为做梦者的轶事、主观体验。

That is, until someone thought to dig deeper, and look — as though lifting a veil — behind their eyelids.

也就是说，直到有人想要更深入地挖掘，就像揭开面纱一样，看看他们的眼睑后面。

In the early 1950s, a graduate student named Eugene Aserinsky hooked his 8-year-old son Armond up to a rudimentary brain-wave machine he had dragged up from the basement of a University of Chicago building.

20 世纪 50 年代初，一位名叫尤金·阿塞林斯基 (Eugene Aserinsky) 的研究生将他 8 岁的儿子阿蒙德 (Armond) 连接到了一台他从芝加哥大学大楼地下室拖上来的简易脑电波机器上。

Aserinksy did not relish sleep research, at the time on the fringes of science, and the prospect of spending his nights awake, observing sleeping subjects, seemed “as exciting as warm milk.”

阿塞林斯基并不喜欢睡眠研究，当时他还处于科学的边缘，而在晚上醒着观察睡眠对象的前景似乎“像热牛奶一样令人兴奋”。

In the bleary morning, looking over a half-mile of polygraph paper, he despaired.

在昏暗的早晨，看着半英里长的测谎纸，他感到绝望。

The ink pens had drawn jagged lines that looked suspiciously like the saccades his son’s eyes made when they’d calibrated the machine.

墨水笔画出了锯齿状的线条，看起来很像他儿子校准机器时眼睛所做的扫视。

They showed the eye movements of a waking person.

他们展示了清醒人的眼球运动。

But his son had been out cold on the lab’s army cot all night.

但他的儿子在实验室的军床上整夜都感到寒冷。

“The research project was blowing up before me,” he later recalled.

“这个研究项目在我面前就爆炸了，”他后来回忆道。

As it turned out, there was nothing wrong with the machine.

事实证明，机器没有任何问题。

Following further study, Aserinsky discovered that his son’s sleeping brain was not — as believed by practically everyone, particularly his thesis advisor, the venerable sleep scientist Nathaniel Kleitman — simply off.

经过进一步的研究，阿塞林斯基发现他儿子的睡眠大脑并没有像几乎所有人，尤其是他的论文导师、受人尊敬的睡眠科学家纳撒尼尔·克莱特曼（Nathaniel Kleitman）所相信的那样，完全关闭了。

Rather, brains roar to life in the darkness, in periods of active, “paradoxical” sleep that seemed to coincide with dreaming.

相反，大脑在黑暗中、在活跃的、“矛盾的”睡眠时期轰鸣着苏醒，这似乎与做梦同时发生。

Aserinsky considered naming the phenomenon “jerky eye movements” but, hoping to avoid being called a jerk himself, opted instead for “ rapid eye movements ,” or REM.

阿塞林斯基曾考虑将这种现象命名为“眼球震颤”，但为了避免自己被称为“混蛋”，他选择了“快速眼球运动”或“快速眼动”。

When Aserinsky left dream science behind in 1953, he passed the baton to a medical student, William C.

1953 年，阿塞林斯基放弃梦科学，将接力棒交给了医学生 William C.

Dement, who’d go on to establish the world’s first sleep disorders clinic at Stanford University.

德门特后来在斯坦福大学建立了世界上第一家睡眠障碍诊所。

Years later, during a Stanford sleep study, Dement woke a subject during a period of unusually consistent back-and-forth eye movements.

几年后，在斯坦福大学的一项睡眠研究中，德门特在一段异常一致的眼球来回运动期间唤醒了受试者。

As LaBerge, once a student of Dement’s, recounted it, the subject had been dreaming about a ping-pong match.

正如德门特曾经的学生拉伯格回忆的那样，对象一直梦想着一场乒乓球比赛。

His eye movements during REM sleep had corresponded to his dream-gaze: left, right, left, right, following the phantom ball.

他在快速眼动睡眠期间的眼球运动与他的梦境凝视相对应：左、右、左、右，跟随幻影球。

This anecdote sparked an idea in LaBerge.

这件轶事激发了拉伯格的一个想法。

The study of lucid dreaming had always been stymied by its dependence on subjective self-reports.

清醒梦的研究一直因其对主观自我报告的依赖而受到阻碍。

But eye movements are measurable.

但眼球运动是可以测量的。

If a subject could deliberately move their eyes in a dream, LaBerge reasoned, then they could signal to outside observers, in real-time, that they were awake in there.

拉伯格推断，如果一个受试者可以在梦中故意移动眼睛，那么他们就可以实时向外界观察者发出信号，表明他们在梦中是醒着的。

He designed an experiment around this premise, tucking a group of experienced lucid dreamers into bed at the Stanford sleep lab and asking them to make a series of prearranged eye movements the moment they became lucid.

他围绕这个前提设计了一个实验，让一群经验丰富的清醒梦者躺在斯坦福大学睡眠实验室的床上，并要求他们在清醒时做出一系列预先安排的眼球运动。

The eye measurements, unmistakable ping-pong volleys on the polygraph paper, corresponded precisely with the dreamers’ waking reports — all in the depths of REM sleep.

眼睛的测量结果，测谎纸上的乒乓球截击，与做梦者醒来时的报告完全一致——所有这些都发生在快速眼动睡眠的深度。

These “signal-verified” lucid dreams changed sleep research forever.

这些“经过信号验证”的清醒梦永远改变了睡眠研究。

Modern lucid dream studies rely on left-right-left-right eye signals to time-stamp experimental tasks and receive messages from the dreamworld.

现代清醒梦研究依靠左右眼信号来为实验任务添加时间戳并接收来自梦境世界的信息。

Lucid dreamers have been asked to signal before and after counting to 10, to measure if time unspools in dreams at the same speed as in waking life.

清醒梦者被要求在数到 10 之前和之后发出信号，以测量梦中时间的流逝速度是否与清醒时相同。

( It does .) They’ve been tasked to signal, with their eyes alone, the answers to simple math problems piped into speakers in the sleep room to establish if two-way communication is possible between a dreamer and a waking experimenter.

（确实如此。）他们的任务是仅用眼睛将简单数学问题的答案传送到睡眠室的扬声器中，以确定做梦者和清醒的实验者之间是否可以进行双向通信。

( It is .) Eyes, windows of the soul, open the door to dreams too.

（是的。）眼睛，灵魂的窗户，也打开梦想之门。

But what is behind that door, exactly?

但那扇门后面到底是什么？

And what is it the lucid dreamers see in there?

清醒梦者在那里看到了什么？

I began my critical state testing without much expectation of what it might bring.

我开始了我的临界状态测试，并没有对它可能带来什么抱有太多期望。

At first, I felt weird counting my fingers.

起初，我数着手指感到很奇怪。

Would my friends think I’d had a stroke?

我的朋友会认为我中风了吗？

Had I been Reddit-brained?

我是不是有点Reddit头脑？

Was I no better than one of those people who believes life is a simulation?

难道我不比那些相信生活是模拟的人更好吗？

But the ritual was a good reminder to put down my phone.

但这个仪式很好地提醒我放下手机。

I began enjoying the blips of mindfulness it brought to my otherwise scatterbrained existence.

我开始享受它给我原本漫不经心的生活带来的正念。

My own hands took on the trippy quality that I remembered from being on mushrooms in college.

我自己的手呈现出我记得大学时吃蘑菇时的迷幻品质。

It only took a few days for the habit to show up in my dreams.

只过了几天，这个习惯就出现在我的梦里。

Dreams are almost always phenomenally embodied.

梦想几乎总是以非凡的方式具体化。

We look out onto the dreamscape and experience its uncanny forms and flavors largely from within an immersed, first-person perspective.

我们主要从沉浸式的第一人称视角中眺望梦境并体验其不可思议的形式和味道。

Philosophers like to say that a dream is a “self-in-a-world” experience.

哲学家喜欢说，梦是一种“自我在世界”的体验。

Even as its fantastical physics support impossible actions like flying, it can never quite succeed in tearing mind from limb.

尽管其奇幻的物理学支持飞行等不可能的动作，但它永远无法成功地将思想从肢体上撕裂。

You can never witness your own death in a dream, for example, because if you did, there would be no you left to dream it.

例如，你永远无法在梦中目睹自己的死亡，因为如果你这样做了，你就没有机会梦见它了。

As the philosopher David M.

正如哲学家 David M.

Peña-Guzmán has written, “There is no dream without a dream ego, no dream ego without a dream body, and no dream body without a dream body-image.”

佩尼亚-古兹曼写道：“没有梦的自我就没有梦，没有梦的身体就没有梦的自我，没有梦的身体意象就没有梦的身体。”

But our dream bodies are only loose sketches of the real thing.

但我们梦想中的身体只是真实事物的松散草图。

When I’m awake, my hands have ink stains and nagging splinters.

当我醒来时，我的手上沾满了墨迹和刺眼的碎片。

I have 10 fingers, and the signet ring I wear on my right hand reads “JB,” my husband’s initials.

我有 10 个手指，戴在右手上的图章戒指上写着“JB”，这是我丈夫名字的首字母。

The first time I thought to examine my hands in a dream, though, they looked like a bouquet of wilting fingers.

然而，当我第一次想在梦中检查自己的手时，它们看起来就像一束枯萎的手指。

The signet ring was etched with unreadable glyphs.

印章戒指上蚀刻着难以辨认的文字。

It’s difficult to put into words the feeling this gave me.

很难用语言来形容这给我的感觉。

One of the key attributes of dreams is that they feel real in the moment.

梦的关键特征之一是它们在当下感觉真实。

When I looked at my hands and saw the mutant flippers of a Midjourney hallucination, I felt the walls drop.

当我看着自己的双手，看到中途幻觉中变异的脚蹼时，我感到墙壁倒塌了。

My whole body flushed.

我整个人都红了。

Nothing was real here — least of all me .

这里没有什么是真实的——尤其是我。

The imprecise texture of the dream-body is a marked contrast to the dream landscape, which can be extraordinarily detailed, even growing in complexity under close examination.

梦身的不精确纹理与梦境形成鲜明对比，梦境可以非常详细，甚至在仔细观察下变得更加复杂。

One of the earliest written accounts of a lucid dream in medical literature, recorded by the Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden in the late 19th century, highlights this phenomenon:

荷兰精神病学家弗雷德里克·范·埃登 (Frederik van Eeden) 在 19 世纪末记录了医学文献中关于清醒梦的最早书面记录之一，它强调了这一现象：

I was floating through a landscape with bare trees, knowing that it was April, and I remarked that the perspective of the branches and twigs changed quite naturally.

我漂浮在一片树木光秃秃的风景中，知道现在是四月，我注意到树枝和树枝的视角发生了很自然的变化。

Then I made the reflection, during sleep, that my fancy would never be able to invent or to make an image as intricate as the perspective movement of little twigs seen in floating by.

然后我在睡梦中反思，我的想象力永远无法发明或制作出像飘过的小树枝的透视运动那样复杂的图像。

Read Noema in print.

阅读印刷版的 Noema。

In his dream, van Eeden experienced a moment of reflection as he observed the remarkable naturalness of each little branch and twig passing beneath his flying body.

在梦中，范伊登经历了一段反思，他观察到每一个小树枝和细枝在他飞行的身体下方经过时都异常自然。

The trees didn’t appear to him as imprecise, or “dreamlike” — quite the opposite.

在他看来，这些树木并不是不精确或“梦幻般”——恰恰相反。

He even thought to himself that such a landscape, although fantastic, must be real because there was no way his own mind could have rendered those spare branches in such detail.

他甚至心想，这样的风景虽然奇妙，但一定是真实的，因为他自己的头脑不可能将那些多余的树枝描绘得如此详细。

Such reflections are considered “pre-lucid” because they signal the dreamer’s stirring awareness — their nagging feeling that something is off.

这种反思被认为是“预清醒”的，因为它们标志着梦者激动人心的意识——他们挥之不去的感觉，有些事情不对劲。

In another classic dream report , the early 20th-century occultist and researcher Hugh Callaway recounted observing that the paving stones outside his home had changed orientation, turning parallel to the curb.

在另一份经典的梦境报告中，20世纪早期的神秘学家和研究员休·卡拉威（Hugh Callaway）讲述了他观察到他家外面的铺路石改变了方向，与路边平行。

This act of noticing brought the true nature of his dream into focus:

这种注意的行为使他的梦想的真实本质变得清晰起来：

Then the solution flashed upon me: though this glorious summer morning seemed as real as it could be, I was dreaming!

然后我突然想到了答案：尽管这个灿烂的夏日早晨看起来尽可能真实，但我是在做梦！

…

……

Instantly, the vividness of life increased a hundred fold.

顿时，生命的生动性增加了一百倍。

Never had sea and sky and trees shone with such glamorous beauty; even the commonplace houses seemed alive and mystically beautiful.

大海、天空、树木从未如此闪耀过如此迷人的美丽；即使是普通的房屋也显得生机勃勃，神秘而美丽。

In dreams as in waking life, attention makes the world alive.

无论是在梦中还是在现实生活中，注意力都让世界变得生机勃勃。

As many oneironauts have by now realized, critical state testing is not very different from mindfulness, meditation or similar practices of closely examining, sensing and being present with the world.

正如许多梦游者现在已经意识到的那样，临界状态测试与正念、冥想或类似的仔细检查、感知和融入世界的实践并没有太大区别。

These practices don’t only help us distinguish between waking and dreaming; they enrich our experience of both states.

这些练习不仅可以帮助我们区分醒时和梦中，还可以帮助我们区分醒时和梦中。它们丰富了我们对两国的经验。

In my own lucid dreams, a ripe, summer stone-fruit from the market explodes with flavor.

在我自己的清醒梦中，市场上成熟的夏季核果散发出浓郁的味道。

The sensation of someone licking my belly feels wet.

有人舔我的肚子的感觉湿漉漉的。

Pain and pleasure unfold in their phenomenal fullness.

痛苦和快乐以惊人的充实展现出来。

But this is always the case.

但情况总是如此。

The sea and sky always shine with their glamorous beauty.

大海和天空总是闪耀着迷人的美丽。

The world is detailed and rich.

世界是详细而丰富的。

How often do I really taste a peach?

我多久真正品尝一次桃子？

How often do I take the time to examine the paving stones?

我多久花时间检查一下铺路石？

Of course it’s trippy to examine my own hands: I never do it.

当然，检查自己的双手是很迷幻的：我从来不这样做。

I rarely look at anything so closely.

我很少如此仔细地观察任何事物。

As the philosophers Jennifer Windt and Thomas Metzinger have observed, we travel through our lives as “naive realists,” assuming that as we perceive, touch and taste the world, we’re interfacing directly with some external, stable reality.

正如哲学家詹妮弗·温特（Jennifer Windt）和托马斯·梅辛格（Thomas Metzinger）所观察到的那样，我们以“朴素现实主义者”的身份过着自己的生活，假设当我们感知、触摸和品味世界时，我们直接与一些外部的、稳定的现实接触。

But in truth, all experience, including our conscious experience of selfhood, relies on input from a chaotic world and is mediated by our limited sensory organs and shaped by our subjective internal landscape.

但事实上，所有的经验，包括我们对自我的有意识的经验，都依赖于来自混乱世界的输入，并由我们有限的感觉器官介导，并由我们主观的内部景观塑造。

Our model of reality is, in philosophical terms, “transparent,” so convincing as to be invisible.

用哲学术语来说，我们的现实模型是“透明的”，令人信服，以至于看不见。

In this sense, dreams aren’t so different from waking experience: They’re both illusions we take, falsely, to be real.

从这个意义上说，梦与清醒时的经历并没有太大不同：它们都是我们错误地认为是真实的幻觉。

“In normal experience, we give ourselves over to the world without really questioning whether it holds at the seams or not,” explained Peña-Guzmán, whose work explores the dreaming lives of animals.

“在正常的经验中，我们把自己交给了这个世界，而没有真正质疑它是否牢固，”佩尼亚-古兹曼解释道，他的作品探索了动物的梦想生活。

“What happens in lucidity is that you begin to attend to the seams and to the cracks — you begin attending to the fact that this is a constructed space, a model, a simulation.”

“在清醒的情况下，你会开始注意接缝和裂缝——你会开始注意这样一个事实：这是一个构建的空间、一个模型、一个模拟。”

The process of attending to the seams is what cognitive scientists call metacognition : the ability to think about thinking.

注意接缝的过程就是认知科学家所说的元认知：思考的能力。

Many philosophers believe that metacognition in dreams requires the capacity for language, since one cannot make the judgement “I am in a dream” without a subject and a predicate.

许多哲学家认为，梦中的元认知需要语言能力，因为没有主语和谓语就无法做出“我在梦中”的判断。

But Peña-Guzmán argues that animals may be able to recognize the oddness of their dreams in a more affective and embodied way — to feel, without forming a linguistic judgement, that their world’s gone weird.

但佩尼亚-古兹曼认为，动物或许能够以一种更情感化、更具体的方式认识到它们梦境的奇怪之处——在不形成语言判断的情况下，感觉到它们的世界变得怪异了。

As with lucidity in people, this is above all a matter of noticing.

就像人的清醒一样，这首先是一个注意的问题。

That’s why techniques to cultivate lucid dreams, like counting fingers or examining the numbers on a clock, ask us to scrutinize the world.

这就是为什么培养清醒梦的技巧，比如数手指或检查时钟上的数字，要求我们仔细观察世界。

In people — and I sincerely hope in animals too — close attention sparks sudden clarity.

对人类来说——我真诚地希望对动物来说也是如此——密切的关注会让人突然变得清晰。

This may take many forms.

这可能有多种形式。

As Peña-Guzmán said, a dog may dream in smell, a bird in song.

正如佩尼亚-古兹曼所说，狗可能在气味中做梦，鸟儿可能在歌声中做梦。

“Think about an electric eel that senses and produces electricity,” he said.

“想象一下能够感知并产生电力的电鳗，”他说。

“It’s conceivable that eel will have electric dreams, and there’s no way for us to even imagine what that is, because we don’t know what it means to experience electricity as meaningful.

“可以想象，鳗鱼会有电梦，但我们根本无法想象那是什么，因为我们不知道体验电意味着什么。

But they do.”

但他们确实如此。”

For humans, this phenomenal feast has another, more specifically cognitive flavor, too: the pleasure of awareness itself.

对于人类来说，这场非凡的盛宴还有另一种更具体的认知风味：意识本身的乐趣。

Dreaming and waking perception are both illusory; they’re models constructed by our brains that turn sensory stimulus, or its absence, into meaning.

梦与醒时的知觉都是虚幻的；它们是由我们的大脑构建的模型，可以将感官刺激或感官刺激的缺失转化为意义。

In waking life, short of a heavy psychedelic experience, that illusion is all-encompassing; there’s no other level of consciousness to “wake up” into.

在清醒的生活中，如果没有沉重的迷幻体验，这种幻觉是包罗万象的。没有其他意识层次可以“醒来”。

But in lucid dreams, we can examine the construction closely.

但在清醒梦中，我们可以仔细检查其结构。

Does this make a lucid dream more conscious than waking?

这是否会让清醒梦比清醒时更有意识？

Is it something, perhaps, just shy of enlightenment?

或许，这只是某种尚未启蒙的事情？

I asked the philosopher Jennifer Windt these questions when I reached her across the sleep-wake divide; as Los Angeles shaded into night, it was already the next morning in Melbourne, where Windt is senior lecturer of philosophy at Monash University.

当我跨越睡眠与觉醒的鸿沟联系到哲学家詹妮弗·温特时，我问了她这些问题。当洛杉矶夜幕降临时，墨尔本已经是第二天早上了，温特是墨尔本莫纳什大学哲学高级讲师。

She winced.

她皱起了眉头。

“I would struggle with that description,” she said.

“我很难接受这种描述，”她说。

“I think that really assumes that consciousness can be neatly ordered in levels.” Windt is part of a school of philosophers painting a far less hierarchical, more multidimensional portrait of consciousness, one informed by close study of edge cases like out-of-body experiences, lucid dreams, mind-wanderings and hyper-realistic false awakenings.

“我认为这确实假设意识可以按层次整齐地排序。”温特是一个哲学家学派的一员，他们描绘了一幅层次少得多、更加多维的意识肖像，这种肖像是通过对灵魂出窍、清醒梦、走神和超现实的虚假觉醒等边缘案例的仔细研究而获得的。

“Traditionally, it’s been thought that not only are sleep and waking opposites, but that they impose a kind of rift, a sharp distinction between conscious states,” she explained.

“传统上，人们认为睡眠和清醒不仅是对立的，而且它们在意识状态之间强加了一种裂痕，一种明显的区别，”她解释道。

But recent empirical and theoretical work supports the idea that consciousness takes many forms along a spectrum between sleep and waking.

但最近的实证和理论工作支持这样一种观点，即意识在睡眠和清醒之间有多种形式。

Daydreams and mind-wanderings, for example, may be caused by spells of “local sleep” in the waking brain, and lucid dreams, which are linked to the reactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — the seat of executive ego function, which is turned off during normal REM sleep — can be thought of as shades of waking consciousness in the gradient of sleep.

例如，白日梦和走神可能是由清醒大脑中的“局部睡眠”引起的，而清醒梦则与背外侧前额叶皮层（执行自我功能的所在地，在正常快速眼动睡眠期间关闭）的重新激活有关，可以被认为是睡眠梯度中清醒意识的阴影。

According to Windt’s work, a dream is an immersive, spatiotemporal hallucination, an experience of being present in a world where thoughts constitute reality.

根据温特的著作，梦是一种身临其境的时空幻觉，是一种存在于思想构成现实的世界中的体验。

But perhaps such experiences can happen when we’re awake, too.

但也许当我们醒着的时候，这样的经历也可能发生。

“I think we should remain open to the possibility that if we define these states phenomenologically,” Windt said, “we might find them occurring in different behavioral states as well.”

温特说：“我认为我们应该对这种可能性保持开放态度，如果我们从现象学上定义这些状态，我们可能会发现它们也发生在不同的行为状态中。”

Every time I go to sleep, I think a new world into being and put myself at its center.

每次我入睡时，我都会想到一个新的世界正在形成，并将自己置于它的中心。

I used to take this nightly miracle for granted because in dreams we all think with an immediacy and directness that leaves no room for distanced self-awareness.

我曾经认为这种夜间奇迹是理所当然的，因为在梦中我们都以一种即时和直接的方式思考，没有给遥远的自我意识留下空间。

When the lucidity comes on, however, autobiographical memories come rushing back.

然而，当头脑清醒时，自传体记忆就会涌上心头。

I can compare the dream to waking life or to previous dreams.

我可以将梦与现实生活或以前的梦进行比较。

I can see clearly that the dream phone in my dream hand is made of Jell-O because I have access to “ secondary consciousness ,” or the meta-awareness of my own state.

我可以清楚地看到我梦想手中的梦想手机是用果冻制成的，因为我可以获得“第二意识”，或者我自己状态的元意识。

I can’t say I’m putting that secondary consciousness to much use yet; mostly, I look for the seams.

我还不能说我已经充分利用了第二意识。大多数情况下，我会寻找接缝。

I find myself at a party in an unfamiliar house and I touch the walls, raid the fridge.

我发现自己在一个陌生的房子里参加一个聚会，我摸了摸墙壁，搜查了冰箱。

What’s in there?

里面有什么？

Do the vegetables vanish when I close the door or do they have a little hoedown, like in an old cartoon?

当我关上门时，蔬菜会消失吗？还是像老动画片里那样，它们有一点点锄头？

I wander into the den and turn on the TV.

我走进书房，打开电视。

On the news, there’s a map of a country called “Orovno.” Did I name this country, draw this map?

新闻中出现了一张名为“奥罗夫诺”的国家的地图。我给这个国家起了名字，画了这张地图吗？

Borges would love this shit , I think.

我想博尔赫斯会喜欢这个东西。

I ask a dream-character his name, trying to ascertain if he is, in some sense, me.

我问一个梦中人物的名字，试图确定他在某种意义上是否是我。

He says: “Jeremy Allen White.” Ok, maybe not.

他说：“杰里米·艾伦·怀特。”好吧，也许不是。

Lucidity advocates like LaBerge, who parlayed his early Stanford lucidity research into a long career as a dream guru, advise their acolytes that dream-control is a learned skill.

像拉伯奇这样的清醒倡导者，他将他早期在斯坦福大学的清醒研究转化为梦境大师的长期职业生涯，他建议他们的追随者，梦控制是一项需要学习的技能。

With time, they promise, I can become a master of my dream domain, commanding characters to my will and redecorating the landscape to my tastes.

他们承诺，随着时间的推移，我可以成为我梦想领域的主人，按照我的意愿指挥角色，按照我的口味重新装饰景观。

I can stock my own fridge, draw my own maps, use the dream as a rehearsal space, perfect my tennis backhand, conquer my fear of public speaking.

我可以在自己的冰箱里装东西，画自己的地图，用梦想作为排练空间，完善我的网球反手，克服我对公开演讲的恐惧。

This emphasis on control and optimization doesn’t entice me much.

这种对控制和优化的强调并没有多大吸引力。

It seems to diminish some of what makes dreams interesting to begin with — their weirdness and mystery, their associative logic.

它似乎削弱了一些让梦本来就有趣的东西——它们的怪异和神秘，它们的联想逻辑。

“The thing that makes a dream exciting, at least for me, is that it’s not the waking world,” said Adam Haar Horowitz, a dream researcher and cognitive scientist who, when I reached him over Zoom at his home in rural Alaska, is fittingly curled up on his bed.

“至少对我来说，梦境之所以令人兴奋，是因为它不是现实世界，”梦境研究员和认知科学家亚当·哈尔·霍洛维茨 (Adam Haar Horowitz) 说，当我通过 Zoom 联系到他位于阿拉斯加乡村的家中时，他正恰到好处地蜷缩在床上。

Horowitz is the co-inventor of the Dormio , a dream engineering device that makes it possible to intentionally incubate specific dreams.

霍洛维茨是 Dormio 的共同发明者，Dormio 是一种梦想工程设备，可以有意地孵化特定的梦想。

The Dormio takes advantage of the moments between being awake and falling asleep known as the hypnagogic state; just as visions begin to form in the darkness and you sense yourself falling, the device whispers prompts into your ear, like “dream of a tree.”

Dormio 利用了清醒和入睡之间的时刻（称为入睡状态）；当黑暗中开始出现幻象并且你感觉到自己正在坠落时，设备会在你耳边低声提示，就像“树之梦”一样。

Hypnagogia is when the full-fledged visions of the dreamworld begin to appear against the background of perception.

入睡时，梦境世界的完整景象开始在知觉的背景下出现。

As they coalesce into immersive hallucinations, they are remarkably suggestible.

当它们合并成身临其境的幻觉时，它们非常容易受到暗示。

Horowitz’s technique involves waking sleepers at precise intervals, helping narrate the dream as it takes shape; he does so to foster creativity, treat recurrent nightmares in veterans and incubate bereavement dreams for people who have lost loved ones.

霍洛维茨的技术包括以精确的时间间隔叫醒睡眠者，帮助叙述正在形成的梦。他这样做是为了培养创造力，治疗退伍军人反复出现的噩梦，并为失去亲人的人们培育丧亲之梦。

In these, he explained, lucidity would spoil the experience.

他解释说，在这些情况下，清醒会破坏体验。

Imagine sitting across the kitchen table from your deceased parent.

想象一下，你和已故的父母坐在厨房的桌子对面。

“You don’t know it’s a dream,” Horowitz said.

“你不知道这是一个梦，”霍洛维茨说。

“That’s the beautiful thing.

“这就是美好的事情。

You’re sitting with them.

你和他们坐在一起。

Why would I want to be in a dream and know it’s a dream?

为什么我会想要在梦中并且知道这是一个梦？

I want to be in the room and want to have the conversation with the person.

我想在房间里并想与那个人交谈。

I don’t want to poke them and say, ‘Wow, what a good hologram.’”

我不想戳他们并说，‘哇，多好的全息图。’”

Horowitz finds the culture of lucid dreaming, with its emphasis on individuality and self-optimization, to be somewhat suspect.

霍洛维茨发现，强调个性和自我优化的清醒梦文化有些可疑。

He asks me, rhetorically: What do people do in lucid dreams?

他反问我：人们在清醒梦中会做什么？

They fulfill fantasies of control, seek personal thrills like flying, have sex with Jeremy Allen White.

他们实现控制的幻想，寻求飞行等个人刺激，与杰里米·艾伦·怀特发生性关系。

The Dormio system is the only dream incubation tool of its type in experimental use, but there are plenty of consciousness-hacking devices on the market intended to induce lucid dreams on demand.

Dormio 系统是同类实验中唯一的梦境孵化工具，但市场上有大量意识黑客设备旨在按需诱导清醒梦。

LaBerge has developed several over the decades with names like the DreamLight and the NovaDreamer.

几十年来，拉伯格开发了多种产品，名称包括 DreamLight 和 NovaDreamer。

A well-funded AI startup, Prophetic , is currently training machine learning models on EEG and fMRI lucid dream data, hoping to beam their findings via transcranial-focused ultrasound directly into willing brains; their Halo device, “the most advanced consumer neurotechnology wearable ever created,” will soon be available.

一家资金雄厚的人工智能初创公司 Prophetic 目前正在利用脑电图和功能磁共振成像清醒梦数据训练机器学习模型，希望通过经颅聚焦超声波将他们的发现直接传输到愿意的大脑中；他们的 Halo 设备是“有史以来最先进的消费神经技术可穿戴设备”，即将上市。

As the media scholar Aleena Chia has written , such technologies promise a “youtopia of automatized dream entertainment.” In certain sectors of Silicon Valley, lucid dreaming is talked about like virtual reality without a headset.

正如媒体学者艾琳娜·贾 (Aleena Chia) 所写，此类技术有望打造“自动化梦想娱乐的乌托邦”。在硅谷的某些领域，人们谈论清醒梦就像不戴耳机的虚拟现实一样。

“What a lame way to relate to your own consciousness,” said Horowitz.

霍洛维茨说：“与自己的意识建立联系是多么蹩脚的方式。”

Dream incubation, on the other hand, he said, “is a really holy, really humble, really hands-off tradition” with ancient roots.

另一方面，他说，梦想孵化“是一个非常神圣、非常谦虚、非常不干涉的传统”，有着古老的根源。

In classical Greek antiquity, dream-seekers traveled to dedicated temples in order to seek specific dreams of healing or guidance; after rituals of purification and supplication, they slept, communally, in sanctuaries dedicated to this purpose.

在古典希腊古代，寻梦者前往专门的寺庙，以寻求特定的治愈或指导的梦想。在举行净化和祈求仪式之后，他们集体睡在专门为此目的的圣所中。

As the religious scholar Kimberley C.

正如宗教学者 Kimberley C.

Patton has proposed in her work, these temples were “god-haunted” places where the gods used dreams to speak between worlds.

巴顿在她的作品中提出，这些寺庙是“神灵出没”的地方，众神用梦境在世界之间进行对话。

In the tradition of incubation, she has written, “Gods and human beings are the co-creators of dreams in the darkness of our mutual sleep.”

按照孵化的传统，她写道：“神和人类是我们共同睡眠的黑暗中梦想的共同创造者。”

In the morning, the temple dreamers interpreted their visions with the guidance of priests.

早上，圣殿梦想家在祭司的指导下解释他们的异象。

Nothing about the dream was private; it was something to be plumbed in public alongside others upon waking with the morning.

梦里没有什么是私人的；这是早上醒来时与其他人一起在公共场合进行探索的事情。

The dream’s prescriptions, a cure proffered by the gods, were enacted in waking life, with the full support of the dreamers’ communities.

梦中的药方是诸神提供的治疗方法，在梦者社区的全力支持下，在现实生活中得到实施。

It is from this tradition, far more ancient than Freud, that we get dream interpretation.

正是从这个比弗洛伊德古老得多的传统中，我们得到了梦的解释。

Similar rituals of public dream incubation have existed throughout history and all over the world, in medieval Japanese Buddhism, in Shia and Sufi Islamic traditions, in Bengal, among the ancient and modern highland Maya, and in many North American Indigenous cultures.

类似的公共梦想孵化仪式在整个历史和世界各地都存在，在中世纪的日本佛教中，在什叶派和苏菲派伊斯兰传统中，在孟加拉，在古代和现代的高原玛雅中，以及在许多北美土著文化中。

I’ve had a few flying dreams since my first lucid dream.

自从我第一次做清醒梦以来，我已经做过一些飞翔的梦了。

I’ve taken swan dives off fire escapes, soared over fields of wildflowers, been pulled into the sun itself.

我曾在消防梯上进行过天鹅式俯冲，曾在野花田上翱翔，也曾被拉入阳光之中。

It can feel exhilarating to fly, to feel velocity amid total stillness.

飞翔的感觉令人兴奋，在完全静止中感受到速度。

To linger in the light of an imagined sky.

徘徊在想象中的天空之光中。

But it’s cold up there, too, trapped inside the dream.

但那里也很冷，被困在梦里。

I can see it all, but I have nobody to share it with.

我可以看到这一切，但我没有人可以分享。

No wonder so many cultures have rituals of group dreaming.

难怪许多文化都有集体做梦的仪式。

No wonder they traveled far and wide to dream together, to seek succor and interpretation from oneiromantic priests.

难怪他们远涉重洋，一起做梦，向梦幻浪漫的牧师寻求帮助和解释。

It makes the night less lonely.

它让夜晚不再那么孤单。