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It wasn’t until I saw Richard Linklater’s Waking Life that I realized other people also had dreams in which they try to turn on light switches, and the scene fails to brighten. Being unable to shed literal light on the situation has been an attribute of my nightmares for as long as I can remember, and it’s often been the fulcrum around which the dream shifts from normal/mildly stressful toward really disturbing/frightening.

Since seeing Waking Life, I’ve sort of assumed that there’s probably some physiological basis for the inability to turn on lights in dreams — that maybe in the typical dream state, it’s hard to light up all the pixels of the visual cortex, as it were, in the same way that my dreams seldom incorporate any tactile sensations that I remember afterwards. I’ve wondered if it might even relate to the absence of color in some dreams.

My cornball notion, unaffected by any knowledge of actual research on the subject, is that maybe most dreams provide a low-fidelity sensory experience, and that exceptionally vivid dreams, with bright and distinct color, sensations of touch and taste, etc., result from unusual dream states in which there is more brain wave energy available to create the richer dream environment.

I just woke up from the first dream I can remember in which the scene suddenly getting much brighter was the event that abruptly skewed the character of the dream into scarytown. I was quite happily setting up a series of boring, but formally composed photographs in the darkened bookstore until a flood of harsh bluish fluorescence transformed it into a pursuit dream.

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