By Maria Isabel Pita © 2014

Lucid Dream of April 15, 2014

 

I’m lying on my left side in a dark room looking at my reflection in a large mirror standing directly before me. I’m so comfortably lucid, I seem to actually be wake. I can see my reflected face quite clearly. It looks just as it does in waking reality, except that my chin is longer and protrudes slightly. Without thinking about it, I carefully but confidently slice into my chin with a razor blade. To me it appears to be excess dead flesh, sort of like a foot callous which can be cut into, up until a certain point.

 

With the fine sharp blade, I make two quick incisions, and remove a chunk of this dead chin flesh. I don’t feel any pain, perhaps just a twinge, as I study the whitish, almost bone-marrow like interior of the clean incision, which is a narrow horizontal oval shape. Very much aware of the sharp razor I’m holding, I begin to wonder why I did this.

 

I don’t think I can finish the job, because I appear to have come dangerously close to the bone.

 

I wonder at how steady and sure my surgical action was, and yet I haven’t really solved the aesthetic problem. I then become more aware of my body, and look down at it. That’s when I realize I made a terrible mistake. In the reflection, I sliced off a pyramid-shaped chunk of my chin, but in reality, I cut off a small chunk of my left breast! The mirror tricked me! It was some sort of optical illusion. I confirm this as I look down at my body, curled directly up against the mirror, and then back at my reflection. I do this several times, making absolutely sure. This is an awful mistake!

 

I don’t feel any pain, only a mild sensation in my breast as, sitting up slightly, I bend over to look more closely at the wound.

 

Yes, I accidentally mutilated my round healthy lovely breast! I somehow know, there is no doubt, the missing piece will grow back, nevertheless, this shouldn’t have happened. But there is nothing to be done now.

 

When I wake, I will have to put some antiseptic on the reddish inner skin, and keep it covered with a clean gauze bandage while it heals.

 

My face is very close to the clean right angle carved into my round breast, and I think this might actually prove useful as a reality check for a while—in a dream, if I look down at my breast and it’s whole, I’ll know I’m dreaming, because in reality it isn’t whole anymore.

 

With this thought, I phase out of the dream.

 

My first terrified thought upon waking was that this was a dream about breast cancer.

 

My knee-jerk response was to conclude that slicing a chunk out of my healthy breast, with a scalpel-sharp razor, was a clear sign I should get tested for breast cancer. I lay awake for a long time thinking about this dream, and trying to read how I had felt in it without letting fear bias my interpretation. The focus of the dream was my witch-like chin, as I directly faced my reflection while lying down as though on a bed. I was trying to make myself more beautiful in the dream. Cutting my breast was an accident, a trick of the mirror, and how it reflected me back at myself.

 

Yesterday, I had browsed some Christian forums where many people still question whether or not lucid dreaming is satanic.

 

Unbelievable, but disturbing nonetheless. Then having dinner alone, I saw an ad (I usually forward through them) for the new TV show Salem in which the narrator asked, ‘What’s worse than a witch trial? A real witch’ at which point they flashed an image of an attractive woman who nevertheless had some ‘ugly’ qualities to her, including a chin that was a little longer than natural. I had also begun reading St. Theresa of Avila’s autobiography, and her remarks—about all the dark doubts and fears that assail the soul as it draws closer and closer to the light of God—were on my mind.

 

In this dream reflection of myself, I recognized the part of me that looked in the mirror every day and experienced a deep-seated guilt, a spiritual shame, that I was entertaining the thought of trying to slow, and perhaps even reverse, the signs of aging on my face and body – of performing lucid plastic surgery in dreams. (The idea was sparked by a conversation with another very experienced lucid dreamer.)

 

Ever since I conceived the vain, superficial intent in the back of my mind, looking at my reflection made me feel uncomfortably like Maleficent, the wicked witch in Snow White, facing her infamous mirror. Deep inside myself – in my soul – I believed, I knew, it was wrong to think of exercising lucidity in the dream space merely for cosmetic purposes.

 

Just before I went to sleep, I had also seen an ad for a television show featuring plastic surgeons in California, which led me to pondering on how common it is in our culture for women to put themselves under the knife, in an effort to stay looking young and beautiful for as long as possible. It is the popular perception these days that a woman has a right to do whatever will help her feel good about herself. The real question this nightmare made me ask myself is, ‘What will really make me feel good about myself, in every sense?’ The truth is that honoring the mystery of the aging process, which encourages the growth of a deeper inner beauty, is what truly makes me happy. Would it really make me feel better about myself to, theoretically, prolong my ‘sexually desirable to a man looks’ whatever the cost? No.

 

Love is all that matters to me, all that has ever truly mattered to me.

 

Loving is what makes me feel good about myself, which includes loving who I am now, and who I am always becoming as, hopefully, my inner self grows ever more beautiful. I feel good about myself when I embrace the spiritual dimension, the blessing, of lucid dreaming, and don’t demote the sacred nature of the dream space by turning it into the salon of my superficial vanity. That is very different from, with prayerful intent, attempting to use my lucid dreaming abilities to assist my physical body, or the body of someone I love, in healing an injury or illness.

 

In this lucid dream I had on a Blood Moon night, I literally put myself under the knife, and taught myself an important lesson that stopped me from crossing a spiritually dangerous line that would have profoundly damaged my well-being.