I time-travel a lot in my sleep.

I have idiosyncratic ‘furnishings’ – my main desk is set up Japanese style, and I use a small assortment of cushions and an exercise ball to lean, slouch, sit, balance or kneel as the mood takes me. One consequence is that if I push myself too hard I get in this hilarious stupid loop of slowly fading more and more of my body onto the floor, Anna and the King of Siam style, shortly before passing out. A few weeks ago I’d passed out on the floor in this manner.

I wake up, but I’m not sore (as I usually am after stupidlooping) and stuff isn’t right. It isn’t still night because there’s light in the window, but the light isn’t right, the smell of the air isn’t right…

Like most people I’ve read a couple of lucid dreaming books somewhere along the way. Normally I remember only miniscule fragments of two or three dreams per year, so practicing recall would have been a long precursor to keeping a journal and instituting habitual reality checks – thus I never even got close to trying to implement anything. For whatever reason at this point, lying on the floor, I get suspicious and think ‘let’s do a reality check.’ There are several tricks you can use to check your reality, but the best is time. Contrary to popular belief, reading (or at least every perception of reading) is possible in dreams. Numbers are screwy, though, and linear time may as well not exist. The gold standard of reality checks, then, is to check a digital clock, then check it again ‘a few seconds’ later.

I do so with my alarm clock. The first time it shows some unusual time, but I’m not even sure it’s morning so that’s no confirmation. A few seconds later, though, it’s been found out and knows it; it doesn’t even bother to display any digits.

‘I’m lucid dreaming! Neat! Stay cool, exert will. Let’s start this mofo off right, I wanna fly.’ I stretch out my arms and come to attention in a supine Iron Cross position – look, Universe, no hands – and in under a second I effortlessly sweep through ninety degrees of arc to vertical, my heels six inches off the floor, ecstatically excited, my entire body thrumming with energy like an overloaded electric transformer.

One half second later, I’m back on the floor – eyes wide open, tired yet completely keyed up, aching everywhere, and furious at my own light-sleeping spoilsport brain.

And sometimes I didn’t.

The one probably with waking up to talking is that sometimes my brain gets confused about what was being said on the radio and what was being said in my dreams…

I actually make sure the first track it plays is always unabrasive, but there doesn’t seem to be any way of guaranteeing it’ll be this one that wakes me up, no matter how loud I make it.

Music just gives me odd dreams, although possibly not that odd.