A few years ago I read a book called "Creative Dreaming" by some woman named Garfield. It is all about how to control your dreams and be conscious while dreaming (lucid dreaming). It spent a whole chapter on stories on famous people who benefitted from their dream state (from inventors to artists). The book suggests techniques to mentally prepare for dreams, to be aware while dreaming, to interact with beings in your dream and to record and keep a dream diary. The book influenced me deeply. For months I would keep a dream diary as carefully as I do with my "waking" one. As I followed Garfield´s advice, letting her enthusiasm trickle through me, I learned to control and benefit from my dreams. I learned to seek answers to my questions during sleep. She maintains that the mind is an immense storehouse of knowledge and intuition and that during dreaming we have much easier access to all this information, free from the inhibiting effect of routine "wakeful" life. Part of her project, the reader´s project, is to methodically tap these vast resources of creativity within, seeking answers to anything that you might want to know. After inspiring tales of success in this other realm, covering such names as Coleridge "Kubla Khan", William Blake, Guiseppe Tartini "The Devil´s Sonata", Robert L. Stevenson, among less famous names, scientists etc. (Nobel prize discoveries some of them), the reader is engouraged to follow in their footsteps. 

I was walking a busy shopping street on a sunny day. Not doing anything in particular I suddenly remembered (this is lucid dreaming, remember) the advice of Garfield. I realized I was dreaming and that I could seek answers to anything! Struck by this realization I headed for the nearest bookshop, and went straight for a book called "The Wonders of the World". I randomly paged back and forth, excited about this discovery, and found the question: Why do things seem darker further out? The question surprised me, for I thought it was the other way around, that things got paler in the distance. And I was intrigued by the answer: "If you have a line of frames that recede in the distance, you would have a rather empty one up front and end up having a dark spot at the very back (with layers of frame upon frame, growing ever denser)". This was so weird, I thought, going against everything I knew, and yet it made sense. I browsed again, and found another question: "If you play music in the desert, why does it sound so low?" Hmmm? Again I thought it would be louder than elsewhere because the desert is so silent. The answer: "There is no reverberation to reflect it back to you?". I closed the book. I had to. I was too freaked out by these inventive answers to impossible questions to continue. I had to go straight out of it (lucid still) and record it before I´d forget because I knew from experience how fast I would lose it. That was fortunate of me, for now I´ve got the dream recorded and I can still read it today many years later. But I´ve never found the bookshop since. Maybe I should put up an ad in my next dreaming session : )