Do you hear what I hear?

Probably not.

Today’s good sleep, the first solid, 8-hour sleep I’ve had in awhile, brought me two auditory dreams.

In my first dream…

…I once again heard the very clear knocking at my front door, a knocking that happened only in my head, not in the real world. The cloak of sleep was finally starting to wrap itself around me at approximately 6:00 AM, or maybe just a few minutes after that, when my eyes popped open at what I heard. Or at what I thought I’d heard. Three sharp, loud knocks at my front door.

Now, if someone had really wanted to rouse me at such an unGodly hour, they’d have repeated the knocks when I failed to respond. They’d have jostled my door knob, or something. But there were no further knocks. There was nothing after the three knocks that woke me, only silence.

Those three knocks were an auditory dream, nothing more.

In my second dream…

…I was “gifted” with an ear-worm. I woke with Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” in my mind’s ear. Now, I liked Glen Campbell years ago, but it’s been one heck of a long time since I’ve listened to any of his music. And there were no sounds in my real world, waking up life that might have planted that song in my head.

Where did it come from? Heck, I don’t know. Where do any dreams come from? Who knows? But there it was. A profound auditory dream.

A signal from beyond?

Last night’s sleep was long and deep, the kind of sleep for which I’m very thankful. It was slightly segmented by one of two lucid dreams.

The second dream of the night dealt with issues of a personal nature, so I’ll not go into it at any length here. It wasn’t disturbing or nightmarish at all, nor did it include anything immoral or illegal; but it dealt with institutions to which some folks have a strong personal attachment and against which others hold strong prejudice. It was very interesting and had some beautiful elements, and was one I wouldn’t be surprised to revisit in the future.

The first dream of the night was the more lucid of the two, though both were more lucid than my average, “run of the mill” dream.

In this dream…

…I was a (the?) lead scientist of a team of scientists investigating an alien artifact.

The origin of the material we were studying was unknown, and its exact nature wasn’t made clear in the dream. But we had come to conclude that it represented an active attempt by some alien entity to contact us, and I had decided on the most appropriate response.

Seated at a computer work station in our large, shared laboratory space, I typed my message to the alien and checked the monitor in front of me to verify that it was what I intended while the rest of the team watched the big, wall-sized flat panel display that mirrored my monitor. I hit the Enter key, sat back, and let out a sigh of relief.

Someone in the room asked, “What happens now?”

“Now,” I replied, “we wait for anything, a signal of some kind.”

Then I woke to the sound of what I interpreted as three sharp knocks at my front door. These weren’t “real” knocks; there was no one at my door. But it woke me to the extent that I opened my eyes and sat up in bed. Realizing that they were “dream” knocks, I applied head to pillow and reentered the dream.

What I saw when I returned to the dream was the big, wall-sized monitor display in the research lab. It showed two text fields: the top field contained the message I’d sent to the alien, and the bottom field was filling up with a stream of new symbols from the alien. Communication was under way.

There was that knocking

Last night’s dreams were fragmented and (at this point in time, several hours after waking) are mostly unremembered. However, one remains very clearly in mind. Actually, I’m not 100% convinced it was a dream.

Lucid dreams can often be categorized as hallucinations, and hallucinations can take many forms.

Last night at 03:00 hours (I’d just drifted off to sleep approximately half an hour earlier, at 02:30) I woke to the sound of five sharp knocks on my front door. My eyes popped wide open, but I lay still, waiting to hear what might come next. If someone really wanted to wake me, they’d knock again, and maybe announce their presence, or call out to me. But I heard nothing more.

For those who don’t know, I live in a residential hotel with a “secured” front door. No one can get in this locked building unless he’s “keyed in” a security number at the front door or has been “buzzed in” by a resident inside.

When I hear an unexpected knock in the middle of the night I’m much more likely to reach for a gun than answer the door. We do live in the real world, ya’ know.

So I waited after those five sharp knocks at 03:00, but heard nothing more. There were no more knocks on my door, no knocks on any other doors in my hallway. No one “tried” my front door knob. There was no sound of voices out in the hallway, and no sound of footsteps or movement of any kind.

Was there someone out in the hallway knocking at my door? Honestly, I don’t know. At this point in time, I’m tending to think that the five sharp knocks were something like an auditory hallucination, or an extremely realistic sound-enabled, semi-lucid dream.