Siggraph and nightmare combat techniques pt 2

So during the week before my presentations, I was spending a lot of time practicing, and worrying. More worrying than practicing actually. As a result, I slept pretty poorly, and when I did sleep I had nightmares.

I know myself well enough to quasi-interpret my dreams. Granted, I have the occasionally totally bizarre, not-at-all-understandable dreams like the one with the surf-bro talking, human hating/killing stegosaurus mentioned in one of my earlier blogs, but those are usually rare. In all honesty my dreams are pretty lame these days. I think that's symptomatic of age, and familiarity with the reality of my existence. Instead of having dreams of wondrous events, flying or super hero powers, I have two modes of dreaming: 1) Dreaming about normal every day crap or 2) Dreaming about crazy terrifying situations that may or may not take place in reality.

The second mode is 90% of the time, a result of stress or anxiety stemming from something going on in my life, and typically it's work or school related. Somewhere around 10-15 years ago, I somehow managed to develop a strategy for dealing with my anxiety dreams. When I was younger, most of my anxiety dreams involved me falling from something, and during the fall, I'd wake up panicked. The way I countered this was what could be considered a temporary lucid dreaming technique. Whenever I'd start to fall, I'd realize that I was dreaming, and then tell myself I was either going to bounce, land in water or glide to safety. After I started using those techniques, my brain stopped feeding me falling dreams and then expressed stress via having some person or thing attack or chase me in my dreams. The way I countered that, was simply by fighting it. In some cases, I had Neo-like control over my body, and severely kicked ass. That was pretty cool. In the past 5 years, I have a new anxiety foe in my dreams and the only way I can describe it is 'evil concentrate'. Now, first and foremost, I don't even believe in the concept of 'evil'. 'Evil' as force is assigned to many things: people, objects, places, fictitious characters that people believe in(the devil), tigers that attack people when they are stupid enough to get into their cage in the zoo, etc. However, the only place I felt it was nearly applicable was to people, and after years of reading about the criminal mind as a hobby, I simply think that what people will describe as 'evil' is actually 'crazy'. Now with that in mind, the fact that my brain is telling me that 'evil concentrate' is attacking me in my dreams, makes me pretty powerless. How am I supposed to deal with something I don't even believe in?

It's hard to describe what the 'evil concentrate' feels like. I'd say it's a mix between a black hole and a bad acid trip. If you've never tried acid or had a bad acid trip, then a bad acid trip is like a living nightmare...wait that doesn't work, this is a nightmare. Ok, a bad acid trip is like questioning whether or not you are going insane and about to die at the same time. The black hole feeling in the dream comes from a feeling like my body is slowly being crushed to the ground, or that full body paralysis is setting in. It's kind of awful.

Last week, during my Siggraph stressing, I had one of these dreams. Usually these types of dreams take place in a house or some kind of confining structure, which usually makes it more scary because I don't know of an immediate escape route. However, this time, I was in an open field, and a huge hole opened up in the sky. Instead of being crushed, I was slowly being dragged upwards into this giant hole. The environment for the dream was very nice: Sunny day, blue skies, a big open grassy field, but this whole was giant and dark. It was warping the sky up and inwards. Once again I felt physically powerless, and just had to go along with it. Whenever this happens, I have a slowly building sense of terror as the force of the evil is more apparent on my body. This dream had a different variable than my standard nightmares - I wasn't alone. I had someone with me that, for whatever reason, I felt compelled to protect. I think this stems from the fact that I had co-presenters in each of my talks last week. With that in mind, I started to think quicker about what options I had to save this person, and myself from this fate. Even though I was thinking of all the ways I could actively combat the hole in the sky, I discovered the resolution by accident. This is going to sound cliche and cheesy but, I combated the evil by laughing. When I was heading up into the hole, I grabbed the generic human who was with me, and said 'Pretty terrifying isn't it?', as this person had never experience my nightmares before, and when I said it, I started laughing which is what I always do to try and calm someone who I'm concerned about. When I started to laugh, the force of the evil over my body lessened, and my sense of terror diminshed. So I joked and laughed some more and very quickly, the evil concentrate disappeared.

Now, normally, this wouldn't be so remarkable, or maybe I wouldn't remember it so vividly, but, when I was giving my last presentation on Friday at Siggraph, and I'd walked into the gigantic room full of people, I was overwhelmed with terror. I really felt like I was going to throw up. I walked to the front of the room, trying not to look at the crowd and just move to my seat. When I finally was settled a bit, I decided to face my fear and evaluate the situation. As I looked into the crowd and saw all the people, I just started laughing. It just seemed so ridiculous that I had expected to speak to about 5-10 people, and instead here was between 500-700. It seemed like a script. Of COURSE there were hundreds of people here, that's much more funny and terrifying, and makes the situation that much more interesting, because that's the kind of shit that always happens to me. So I started to laugh.... When I started laughing, this feeling of dire seriousness just seemed to leave my body. I thought 'huh...this reminds me of my dream.' So I decided to go with it. Instead of brooding over how I might fuck up, puke or faint, I just sat there grinning and kind of laughing about it.

It worked!

Granted, I was still nervous, but I was making jokes on stage, smiling, and essentially making light of the situation, which is exactly what it was supposed to be, a light-hearted fun(sorta) situation. Now, I realize this sounds kind of new-age-y, feel good, chicken-soup-for-the-soulish, but I absolutely have to stand by it as a means to deal with what is a danger free, but terrifying situation. For awhile now, I've had a suspicion that I'm problem solving in some capacity via my dreams, and after last week's experience, I'm sure of it. Now, if only I'd figure out how to get these solutions out of my subconscious faster, so I don't have to wait another 37 years to have my dreams tell me that smiling is the cure for suicidal tendencies....